Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has revealed that it is testing a number of new features that will allow users and companies to customize their Facebook News Feed experience.
People may now adjust the quantity of content they see from friends, family, Groups, and Pages on Facebook as well as the topics they care about in their News Feed Preferences, according to Meta.
“We’re testing new ways to make it easier to find and use News Feed controls to adjust people’s ranking preferences and customize their News Feed”, said Meta in the blog post.
The company will make available controls such as favorites, reconnecting, snoozing, and unfollowing easier to access as well. Facebook’s new test will initially be offered to a limited number of users and will be made available to all eligible users in a phased manner.
For its business customers, Facebook is executing a Topic Exclusion for News Feed test on a limited number of advertisers that run ads in English. According to the reports, “The advertisers can select from three topic groups — news and politics, social issues, and crime and tragedy.”
When an advertiser chooses one or more themes, their ad will not appear in the News Feeds of users who are interested in those topics. Meta noted that in their early testing, advertisers who have excluded the news and politics categories were able to avoid news and political adjacency 94 percent of the time.
Meta considers the Topic Exclusion controls as a bridge product and the company plans to begin testing a new content-based suitability control to address advertisers’ concerns about ads being displayed next to specific topics based on their brand suitability preferences in both Facebook and Instagram feeds. The company is planning to start the rollout in 2022.
Further, Meta plans to collaborate with third-party brand safety partners to establish a solution by the end of 2021 that will verify whether content adjacent to an ad in News Feed fits with a brand’s suitability preferences.
