Facebook To Let You Control What Appears In Your News Feed
Facebook has redesigned and expanded Facebook’s News Feed Preferences to give you more control and let you choose what you see in your feeds. Seperately, the social network said it would stop sharing your 'likes' with advertisers. The changes in the News Feed were firstly introduced in May, but they were only available to a select few. From today, however, the new set of controls are rolling out to all.
To help prioritize stories, and make sure you don’t miss posts from particular friends and Pages, you can now select which friends and Pages you would like to see at the top of your News Feed.
Within News Feed Preferences, tap on a friend’s profile picture to see their posts first. You will then see any new stories they’ve shared since your last visit to Facebook at the top of News Feed, with a star in the top right of their post so you know why they’re at the top. You can scroll down to see the rest of your News Feed normally.
Based on the types of Pages you’ve liked in the past, you can discover new Pages in order to get more of the stories you care about.
With an updated design of the tools, you can now see a list of the top people, Pages and groups that you’ve seen in your News Feed over the past week, and choose to unfollow any friend, Page or group if you don’t want to see their updates. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and choose to re-follow them at any time.
The new ways to control your News Feed will be available today on iOS and will be rolling out on Android and desktop over the coming weeks.
New policy on how Cost per Click is Measured
Seperately, the world's largest social network plans to stop passing on data about likes or shares to advertisers in an attempt to simplfy the way companies pay for ads and measure their success.
In the coming weeks, companies that advertise on Facebook using cost-per-click will only receive information about clickthroughs -- if a Facebook user clicked on an ad or left the site because of an ad.
No data about likes, comments or shares of ads or other commercial content will be passed on to advertisers.
Although privacy concerns could be hidden behind the new rules, it appears advertisers will now only be charged when a user clicks on the ad. Facebook says that providing data on all of these metrics actually made it harder for companies to understand if a campaign was successful.
If you buy Facebook ads through a Facebook interface (like Ads Manager or Power Editor), you don’t need to do anything right now. Facebook will share further information about the updated CPC’s implementation in its interfaces.
If you buy through a Facebook Marketing Partner, you should speak with your Marketing Partner to understand when they’ll be implementing the new API with updated CPC.
If you buy through the API, you can begin buying ads with the
updated CPC today (July 8) in v2.4 of the Ads API. If needed, you can continue using
the existing CPC definition until October 7. After this date, only the updated CPC
will be available.