“Facebook launched today Page aggregation by Topic, so that whenever your friends post something related to Apple for example, it gets aggregated into a cluster with all the other stories about Apple and tags the Apple fan page.”–source
Here’s an example from my newsfeed: two friends mentioned Campus Crusade, Facebook grouped the updates together, and then tagged Campus Crusade’s Page at the top.
Facebook seeks to continue to optimize the newsfeed to show more relevant updates, but I wonder if this step will overall be a net loss or break even. First off there are going to be a variety of mistakes–updates will be grouped together that have no relevant connection. Then tagging pages will have it’s issues as well–for example if the “Jesus” page is tagged how relevant and helpful is that for me to look at a page that is so broad that it’s lost any specific meaning for most people?
Techcrunch feels similar:
“While it seems obvious that Facebook is doing this to increase in engagement on Fan Pages, it doesn’t seem to add very much value to users and is a toss for brands.”
The reality for ministries is that their pages are going to be much more visible in people’s newsfeeds–and now people will not have to manually tag a page for it to be easily found and integrated into other people’s newsfeeds.
Have you noticed this change yet? What do you think?