According to the information by The Guardian the new feed is being tested in six countries that include Slovakia and Serbia.
Facebook's new approach would mean that most of the content from liked paged would be moved from the main feed to the secondary feed, and thus the main news feed would consist of posts by friends as well as so-called promoted posts, also known as advertisements.
This would obviously mean that if a news source wants to reach the Facebook users they have to promote their piece or otherwise it'll be shown only in the secondary. And we all know what happens when you demote something to, for example, Google's second page or further.
It of course could be that people who want to follow liked paged, including the ones publishing news, will start following two pages instead of one but so far in the trial it doesn't look like it. According to the Guardian the user engagement has dropped between 60 and 80 percent.
It would seems that trial might not be going too well, although who knows Facebook's targets. Facebook, like other internet companies, does a lot of this type of A/B testing, and if indeed it doesn't work in a smaller scale then we will likely never see it implemented worldwide.
Written by: Matti Robinson @ 24 Oct 2017 11:12
