by samOne of my recent blog posts focused on Facebook experimenting with their news feed—relaxing the content filter, which would leave users exposed to all manner of disparate and insignificant updates. If this were to be the default Facebook feed, there would need to be some form of organisation out of necessity. So, Facebook has been testing a ‘clustered news’ feed, collecting data from users’ posts and aggregating them in catch-all update groups.
We’ve seen a grouping of content before, but this has generally been specific, like the mutual sharing of a link or multiple ‘friends’ posting on another friend’s wall. This new clustering is different. It uses natural language processing to automatically detect keywords in users’s posts and brings them together in a non-discriminatory way. In a way, this collecting of content creates a localised form of Twitter’s trending topics, and while the Facebook ‘trends’ don’t share Twitter’s globe-spanning capabilities, they do potentially suffer from the same lack of organised topic or sentiment.
Despite posts being linked by keywords, there is nothing to say that the nature of the posts is similar; they could cover completely different aspects of a topic. User disposition isn’t taken into account either, so if this clustering went ahead in its current form, we’d be seeing messages of approval combined with both genuine and troll-like disapproval.
So, what is the significance for those in Internet marketing? A lot of speculation has suggested that the changes have been made in favour of brands that aren’t happy with the exposure garnered by their PPC ads and featured stories alone. These new ‘friend trends’ are also endowed with clickable links to brand pages when Facebook can pick up on brand mentions. The opportunity for growth comes from the simplicity of realising the current points of interest of your social circles in an organised way, as opposed to many disparate activity updates.
Would the increased exposure benefit brands if this form of aggregated posts were to stick? It seems likely that it has the potential to create a ‘buzz’ and increase awareness of brand activity. In a first, second, and third ‘degrees of separation’ sense, the buzz could transcend social circles, but the buzz could be negative. If anything, these changes present a double-edged sword. The groupings will most likely lead to more exposure and followers for brands, but when considering ‘negative trends,’ there is more incentive for brands to monitor their SMO efforts as topics may be given a means of growing through Facebook as they have on Twitter, despite the smaller scale.