The Facebook Newsfeed is evolving. What’s in store for the future?
In increasing clutter in the Facebook Newsfeed means that marketers and content creators find it more difficult than ever to differentiate and stand out.
It’s now hard to picture what Facebook would be like without the news feed, a concept which — in essence — takes the hard part out of navigating friends’ pages. And can you believe that when the site launched in 2004, it was basically just a directory of names, interests and contact information? Since then it’s become a much smarter, complicated platform over the years, and it’s brought a lot more depth to the user experience along the way. When Facebook first launched its News Feed 10 years ago, users went bananas. They absolutely hated the change.
“It was the most inflorious launch moment in history”
- Chris Cox
It also ended up changing the way that we use the internet.
The Beginning
Back in 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed — which appeared on the homepage. Before the News Feed, you wouldn’t see a collection of updates and stories when you logged onto Facebook. You’d only get personal notifications like how many people had ‘Poked’ you and if anyone had written on your Wall. Every browsing session was like a click-powered treasure hunt: You would search for specific people to look at their profiles and then just wander through the site from there. Most people won’t remember what that was like: At the time of the change, the social network only had 10 million users, compared to its roughly 2 billion active users now.
While the profile page has evolved into the timeline view, the NewsFeed has continued to persist and is currently the prime ground for everything Facebook is arching on, as it looks to the next few years ahead and in a privacy focused vision that it previously outlined at this year’s F8, it is more important than ever that the direction the NewsFeed takes, is for the company.
When the NewsFeed was launched at the time, this was a radical departure from what we had seen on Facebook before, and it was also a concept we were relatively unfamiliar with on other parts of the Internet. This spawned a lot of negative attention around news feed in the beginning — many didn’t understand it, questioning how personal information would be highlighted to others.
More Control
In 2009, Facebook made a few changes to the homepage, alongside introducing new profiles for public figures and organizations. When a user Liked a page, he or she would see updates from celebrities, athletes and politicians in the stream. Meanwhile, thanks to new filters, users could decide if they only wanted to see updates from family members or social circles in the feed.
Facebook periodically rolled out smaller updates based on user feedback. A few weeks later, it added controls to reduce app content from appearing in the stream, as well as added photos tagged of friends (so you didn’t miss what your closest friends were doing). As more people got used to news feed, the product got smarter. In 2011, Facebook started displaying news updates you were most interested in at the top of the feed, instead of strictly chronological updates. This was the moment when the algorithms begun to take over, one click at a time.
The NewsFeed today
The Newsfeed has become the go-to place for people to connect with their friends, share updates about their day-to-day life and enjoy content from brands they followed. Not to mention, it also played a pivotal role in Facebook’s march to advertising dominance. It serves news to more US adults than any other social network. That makes its ever-changing algorithm extraordinarily powerful: The average Facebook user has 2,000 different stories that they could potentially see every day, but they’ll only end up seeing about 200 of them.
In life and business, though, change is inevitable. And just as popular culture, music, and fashion move on, Facebook should too. For nearly a decade, the News Feed was the jewel in Facebook’s crown. However, over the past couple of years, Facebook has been battling a decline in content that is shared on the platform.
The content clutter = a marketers dilemma
Everyone’s Newsfeed is getting extremely cluttered with images and videos, be it memes, food recipes, or someone’s new year trip, that get glossed over with the least amount of attention given to them. But Facebook still remains the medium of choice for a majority of the internet.
It’s the job of marketers to now use newer technologies built into the platform to get a higher engagement ratio on their pages and stand out between the noise.
There are studies that show how tactile interactions ensure greater recall of the brand. Tactile exploration of objects activate conceptual representations of objects and also influence the processing centres of the brain.
The sense of touch results in interactions that generate a sense of affinity in humans and increases a sense of belonging and ownership, therefore, triggering the parietal lobe, the mesolimbic pathways (reward system) and the hippocampus (memory centre) of the brain.
Brands have always tried to get people to build affinities with their products and with the rise of immersive and interactive marketing, marketers can utilise new technologies and mediums to transport users to new worlds and change the way they interact with content. Instead of passively watching, viewers can now be part of the experience and move around and interact with new mediums.
You might be wondering how you can do all this while maintaining the same ROI as before.
Facebook’s latest format of 3D posts provide users with a chance to interact with objects directly by ‘thumbing’ through the model, this post type has radically changed the way users consume content on Facebook, also giving marketers the opportunity to disrupt the newsfeed and really ‘turn’ their brand messages around.
In addition to having potentially positive benefits on marketing and SEO efforts, 3D media can also help brands set themselves apart tying together with the concept of ‘tactile’ feedback and build greater interaction.
Here are a few ways that you can use Facebook 3D posts for your brand:
1. Use it to show messages
3D objects have the advantage of having depth and multiple sides, which enables you to place messages within (or behind) the object forcing the user to spin and interact with the post.
2. Create Interactive Spaces
Create 360° views of spaces that show a particular scene, making the user interact with the post to view the entire space. Pretty cool right?
3. Make Interactive Polls
Sharing opinions across the internet is a classic, from voting for your favourite food, to liking or commenting to showing support, users love sharing opinions across various social networks. Create a 3D poll to engage your users across the Facebook platform!
4. Interactive Campaigns
Make interactive campaigns that show off a brand’s ambassador or even a character created specifically for the campaign.
5. Character Reveals
If you’re a marketer in the entertainment industry, you can use 3D posts to reveal characters in upcoming movies or shows.
At this point, you’re asking yourself how you can do all of this without having an extensive knowledge of 3D modelling and design. That’s where Scapic comes in.
Scapic is a platform that lets you create Facebook 3D posts quickly and easily without the hassle of 3D expertise allowing you to share them directly on your Facebook page.
Here is an easy to use guide
1. Get to the tool
Head over to Scapic and login (or sign up if you haven’t already).
2. Select a theme
Choose a theme to get started with, from travel themed objects to themed frames we’ve got them all.
3. Drop it like it’s hot
There are multiple things you can add to your post:
- 3D Objects
- 2D images/media
- 3D Text
- 3D Effects
- Uploads
3D Objects: Select from a list of specially curated objects we’ve got for Facebook 3D posts to add that secret sauce to your post or use your own models by clicking on the Upload button.
2D Media: Choose from a plethora of beautiful images from Unsplash or Pexels to add to your scenes or upload your own by clicking the Uploads button.
3D Text: Add that extra zing to your post by adding text from our collection of custom made fonts, use the various effects like Retro or Glossy to get the aesthetic right!
3D Effects: Use 3D effects to bring your post to life, use effects that range from Snowfall to Confetti to level up your post.
Uploads: This is where all your 3D models and images are going to be stored, upload new assets or choose from previously uploaded ones to add them to your post.
One thing that you’ve got to keep in mind when you’re creating a Facebook 3D post is to stick to the size limit (3MB, which is a requirement from Facebook), we’ve put a counter right below the preview to show you the size of your creation.
4. Sharing is caring
Once you’re done with adding your desired objects and images to the post, click on the Share button on the top right corner, this will you show you a share window where you can enter your post’s details and even preview your post on the newsfeed.
Once you’ve entered all the details, just click on Share to Facebook.
And done! Your creation is now on Facebook!
How simple was that to create? Head on over to Scapic to start creating and adding a new dimension to your feed today.
Why add the D?
If you have read this far, the overarching question might be on why 3D content is important for the Newsfeed anyway. Facebook’s addition of content, content formats and distribution mediums to the Newsfeed has been a steady click over the last few years. Tracing back, it started with 360 media:
After Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, the VR industry received a kickstart and 360 content was touted to be the next big video innovation. To make the distribution of 360 content possible, Facebook brought the format to be compatible right inside your NewsFeed.
This was followed up with the ability to grab panoramic images and bring them to the newsfeed directly. Mobile VR has had its on and off moments and the newsfeed was a central source of content discovery, distribution and consumption.
Then, Facebook’s plan switched from 360 content, to 3D content. 3D is the bedrock for the next frontier of devices and hardware, specifically Virtual and Augmented Reality devices. The Newsfeed has and continues to be the central way and mechanism through which the social media giant plans to distribute and present 3D content to a 2D-now version of the web.
With Facebook’s 3D on Newsfeed play, computational photography and depth maps that are generated on mobile phone cameras are now used to create immersive 3D photos.
The next frontier, and perhaps an exciting one is the ability for Facebook’s new suite of tools such as Spark to enable Augmented Reality and 3D advertising for marketers, brands and publishers. 3D and AR as an ad format fundamentally offer significant advantages over traditional display ads.
Plugging into the future
Facebook’s emphasis on immersive content is incredibly important from a strategic view for the company, given it’s view of the 10 year future ahead.
Over the years, the way we have interacted with computers have become more personal and direct. The natural evolution of the same is from instructions to GUI to now, spatial computing. This puts Facebook as one of the foremost pioneers in the forefront of the next wave of computing interfaces in the form of VR/AR and they have been bullish on both the mediums to put it mildly.
Hence, as devices continue to evolve, the content that powers them will inevitably change too. This change is what we’re witnessing today via the Newsfeed. To that, it becomes clear that Facebook is building the foundations of the content platforms of the future. This presents a challenge but a larger opportunity for marketers and creators to leverage on the next possible content wave. As we move from the town square to living rooms, the type of content we generate and consume perhaps becomes more important than ever. Perhaps, the Newsfeed will change the way we use the internet, yet again.
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Create your own Facebook 360°, 3D posts, VR Experiences all without any coding or 3D expertise on Scapic.
