Facebook is now testing a major change in its platform and is basically now exploring the idea of dividing its News Feed into two pages. So when users log in to the popular social media network they might see a separated commercial page and a personal news feed page.
As of now, users in six countries which include Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia will see a split news feed that shows only their friend's posts on the primary feed, and commercial posts on another feed called Explore. Facebook is conducting the trial among the users in these six countries.
The Facebook news feed is the main landing page, every time a users logs into the the Facebook app or the website. Here users can see the recent posts and updates from friends and family, advertisements and material from celebrities or other pages that a user has liked and followed. It also includes groups that users are part of, targeted advertising, suggestions to follow pages and more.
So the news feed is basically consolidated where all the information is found on one single page. However, with the new trials going on, it could change if Facebook is successful with the tests.
"The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it's an idea worth pursuing any further," said Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed at Facebook, in an official announcement.
As of now, this is both good and bad news for most users. Good because the new feature will enable more streamlined posts in the news feed. However, it is bad news for people who have their own Page on Facebook. The change could force those who run pages from news outlets to musicians to sports teams, to pay some amount to run the advertisements if they want it to be seen in the feed of their friends and family.
Besides that, the social media giant's new move could also benefit some businesses as it will help them increase advertising on the platform.
But again not everyone is impressed by Facebook's new move. Slovakian journalist Filip Struhárik has expressed his concerns on a post in Medium, "Pages are seeing dramatic drops in organic reach. Reach of several asked Facebook pages fell on Thursday and Friday by two-thirds compared to previous days. Sixty biggest Slovak media pages have 4 times fewer interactions (likes, comments, shares) since the test."
However, in line with this, Mosseri has said that the company has no plans for a global test of the two separate feeds for its 2 billion users. "Facebook also does not currently plan to force commercial pages "to pay for all their distribution," he added.
