Facebook is testing new ways to make it easier for users and businesses to customise their Facebook News Feed experience. With the latest development, users will now be able to control the amount of content they would like to see from their contacts on Facebook.
“We’re testing new ways to make it easier to find and use News Feed controls to adjust people’s ranking preferences and customise their News Feed,” Meta said in the blog post.”
The social media giant’s parent company Meta has announced in a blog post that it is also improving the existing controls to offer users better access to features like Favorites, Snooze, Unfollow and Reconnect. For its business customers, Facebook is planning to expand the Topic Exclusion controls for News Feed test to a limited number of advertisers that run ads in English.
The company has asserted that advertisers will get to choose from three topic groups, including news and politics, social issues, and crime and tragedy. Now if an advertiser chooses one or more topics, their ad will not be shown to users who recently engaged with those topics in their News Feed.
Meta further stated that their early testing revealed that advertisers who 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 is planning to test out a new content-based suitability control, which will help them address concerns that advertisers have of their ads appearing in Facebook and Instagram feeds next to certain topics based on their brand suitability preferences. The company has confirmed that it will start the rollout by next year.
Lastly, Facebook’s parent company also has plans to work with third-party brand safety partners before the end of this year to “develop a solution to verify whether content adjacent to an ad in News Feed aligns with a brand’s suitability preferences.” The company will start with a request for proposals in the coming weeks.