We at SND love our Facebook, but the social media monarch has us scratching our heads from time to time by introducing minor tweaks to the layout. The latest of which? A news feed option called “Pages Feed” that lets you view pages only.
Facebook users are highly protective of the layout, and even a popular overhaul like Timeline receives its fair share of petty criticism before ultimately being embraced by the majority. In between massive format changes, Facebook likes to tweak little things (like the odious “notifications right” experiment). The latest format adjustment is a “Pages Feed” option that removes your friends from the news feed and shows updates from your “liked’ pages only.
This feature will roll out slowly to users starting today, and is an undeniably good change for businesses, consumer brands, sports teams, media, and politicians.
You’ll know you have it when a “Pages Feed” option appears on the left hand side of your homepage. We haven’t gotten it yet, but here’s a screencap from The Next Web showing the change:
See how under “Pages” there’s a “Pages Feed” option next to an adorable little flag.
According to Mashable, the “Pages Feed” might be more of a move to satisfy companies and brands than help users exclusively engage with them. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recently expressed his frustration at being buried in the news feed, and on Tuesday, he admitted that he’s considering moving the Mavericks off Facebook completely in favor of Tumblr.
FB is blowing it ? This is the first step.. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new Myspace as primary site twitter.com/mcuban/status/…
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 27, 2012
What do we think? That the “Pages Feed” is unquestionably for companies and brands, but you know? Facebook has to make them happy too. “Pages Only” offers a nice compromise between pages and personal users, though. If the news feed started with the “Pages Feed” when you log in, and the onus was on you the user to switch over to the full news feed, then we’d cry foul. But Facebook is giving companies and brands a nice option that doesn’t interfere with users that are on Facebook to engage with friends and family first.
Have you gotten the “Pages Feed” option yet? What do you think of it?
