Social Chatter Episode 21: Facebook Improves News Feed for More Relevant Stories

Welcome to this week’s episode of Social Chatter where we cover the latest social media news from this past week.

Each episode of Social Chatter is available as a blog post or video.

Let’s see what’s cooking in social media this week with your hosts, Christian Karasiewicz and Vincent Orleck!

Watch This Week’s Social Media Updates

Facebook Tweaks News Feed for More Relevant Stories

This week, Facebook announced they are using qualitative feedback to bring you more relevant stories in your Facebook News Feed.

“The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. The actions people take on Facebook—liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post—are historically some of the main factors considered to determine what to show at the top of your News Feed. But these factors don’t always tell us the whole story of what is most meaningful to you.”

This is great news if you've noticed your News Feed has started to show content you're not necessarily interested in.

Through Facebook's research, “people reported having a better News Feed experience when the stories they see at the top are stories they are both likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with.”

This won't just affect Facebook Profile's. Facebook Page's should also see improved visibility.

Here's what Facebook said about pages.

“In general this update should not impact reach or referral traffic meaningfully for the majority of Pages; however, some Pages may see some increases in referral traffic, and some Pages may see some declines in referral traffic. ”

We're excited to see an improved News Feed.

Facebook Private Messaging for Page Comments

Another new update this week is the ability to send a private message directly from Facebook Page comments.

Previously, if someone left a comment, you could only respond back to them through the comment.

Now there's a message option to let you send them a private message from your page.

When you click this from your Facebook Page, you'll get a pop-up box with the person's name.

After you send them a message from a comment, the message option changes to "see response."

Clicking it takes you to the message you send them in your Facebook Page messages.

Facebook Friends Day - Celebrating the Importance of Connections

Also this week, Facebook celebrated their 12th birthday with Facebook Friends Day.

“These videos stitch together special moments with your friends in a short film that can be edited and shared. ”

Twitter Shows More Tweets to Logged Out Users

In other social media news this week, Twitter announced they are bringing more tweets to people around the world.

Previously, you could only see individual tweets. Now they're making it easier by showing stories and conversations happening on Twitter without the need to login.
 

View Entire Tweet Conversations

Previously, if you clicked on a tweet, you didn't see the entire conversation.

Now when you click on a tweet, it opens in a separate window in your timeline.

If there are multiple replies, all of the replies show with the tweet.

Instagram Testing Account Switching on iOS

Would you like to be able to switch between multiple Instagram accounts?

Instagram has been testing the ability to switch between different Instagram accounts without the need to logout.

Here's what that would look like.

Image via Latergramme

Tools

In addition to sharing the latest in social media news from this past week, we also highlighted some great tools and apps to check out.
 

PicPlane

PicPlane let's you use customer' public Instagram photos on your website.

This is good news if you're looking to use someone's photos from Instagram, but you don't know if you can.

If you're a business, you should also be using this tool because it can help you source content from your audience - which can be extremely useful for generating content for use on your social media channels.

Current for Facebook

Would you like to use Facebook, but you find you're always getting distracted by other open website tabs?

With Current for Facebook, you can receive notifications when you have new updates, create new posts and message your friends and customers without getting distracted.

Current for Facebook operates as a desktop app. This way you don't get pulled into opening another browser tab. Instead, you can focus on your work.

Drafts

The last tool we wanted to share this week is Drafts.

Drafts is an extremely powerful text editor.

What makes it unique though is that you can quickly capture text for blog posts, social media channels, presentations and so on.

Instead of letting them reside within the app, you can send them to each area.

For example, you can write-up a post for Facebook inside Drafts and then have that text posted to Facebook.

Drafts works with your favorite social media channels as well as many other popular apps you use on your mobile device to help you quickly create social media posts, blog posts and so on in seconds.

Wrap-up

That’s it for this week’s episode of Social Chatter.

Be sure to tune-in to our next episode on Blab to find out what’s cooking in social media!

If you have any questions about anything mentioned this week, share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.

About The Author

Christian Karasiewicz Founder, Social Chefs Founder and CEO of Social Chefs, a digital marketing agency. I host two shows, #SocialChatter, the industries longest running social media marketing talk show and Social Snacks, 5 minute or less social media marketing tutorials.