Facebook’s newsfeed has been determining how users absorb information on Facebook for the past decade. Part of Facebook’s revenue model is selling likes to businesses, telling them it’s the quickest way to get their content into users’ timeline.
All that changed last week when Facebook announced that users had to add your page to “See First”. Users can now go to Pages, friends, or public figures’ profiles and add them to their See First list that’s managed in the revamped News Feed Preferences. Getting added to that list guarantees all their posts will appear at the top of a user’s News Feed with a blue star.
Marketers just got a concrete wall handed to them, but there’s a bright side to it. It means users who add them to “See First” actually want to engage with them, unlike the old newsfeed that continuously got updated with uninteresting content.
Then to make pages sexier, Facebook will remodel pages as an e-commerce platform to attract more traffic. Essentially, users will be able to complete the whole shopping experience on company pages from product discovery to checkout.
This will shift some of the traffic away from the newsfeed and will serve as a great boost to online commerce. Probably, fewer e-commerce sites will be built and more Facebook pages opened.
