The term News Feed is generally used to refer to Facebook’s homepage, which shows a selection of posts from a user’s network, as well as from pages and brands that they follow. The newsfeed is where many of your ads will show, as well as many of the posts you share through your pages. The term is also used to describe continuous news delivered through any broadcasting channel or medium.
News Feed
The news feed is the term used to describe the ‘feed’ of news that you will see when you visit Facebook’s homepage. This is where you will see updates from friends and relatives in your social network, as well as articles and blog posts from pages and brands that you follow.
The term can also be used more broadly to describe news feeds on other sites: such as the Twitter feed and the Instagram feed.
However, it originally was used to refer to news shared on a regular/continuous basis from any form of broadcaster or media. This might include a ticker that streams at the bottom of a television channel showing headlines and updates, or it might refer to a 24-hour news channel.
In this breakdown, we will focus primarily on the former definition as this is the one that can have the most potential benefit for digital marketers and the like.
The Importance of the Newsfeed
If you intend to be successful on Facebook as a marketer, then it is very important that you try and get your content onto the newsfeed. Many people don’t realize this and will make infrequent posts that are passive and not engaging with the audience – then wonder why their channels aren’t growing!
Likewise, once someone has started following you on social media, it is unlikely that they will actually visit your page in order to look for updates. Most of us aren’t that engaged with a brand that we will actively seek out its content on social media.
So even now, people are only going to see your images, videos and blog posts if they show up on their newsfeed.
The problem is that when a Facebook page shares a link, an article or anything else, that pFrost will only be visible to a small percentage of the followers on the page. Facebook once showed its users every piece of news from all their friends and all their pages. However, they changed this once the amount of content began to swamp the homefeeds. Some brands would ‘spam’ this method of contacting audiences and the result was that users would only get to see a small percentage of posts from friends and people they wanted to hear from.
Getting Shares
From here, your other objective is to try and ensure that you get maximum ‘value’ from this content. That means that you want to ensure that the content is read and that it is commented on, liked and shared.
When someone likes or comments on a post, that post will then be seen by a percentage of that person’s network. This in turn will potentially lead to even more comments, even more likes and even more shares – potentially resulting in an exponential spread across the social network. This can result in viral content eventually.
