Facebook Test Gives People More Control Over What Appears In News Feed

Facebook continues to experiment with adding more of a human touch to the News Feed.

The company is testing a feature that enables people to make sure posts from certain people and Pages show up at the top of their News Feeds. Spotted today by Josh Constine of TechCrunch, the “See First” test is similar to another that surfaced last month.

Each gives people more control over what appears in the News Feed, levers that Facebook has traditionally left to its algorithm to push and pull. Facebook does give people the chance to unfollow people and unlike Pages and indicate that “I don’t want to see this” to indicate the type of posts they want to see less of. And there are settings to allow for notifications from favorite people and Pages, but the experiments go further in giving News Feed power to the people.

It’s not an academic matter for marketers, who are constantly trying to figure out ways to get their messages into people’s Facebook feeds. However, it’s not clear that “See First” or any other such user control if rolled out widely would improve reach for Facebook Pages. After all, businesses hoping to take advantage of such features would have to ask its fans to take an extra step beyond like.

Here’s how the latest test looks (screen grabs courtesy of Constine):

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the test in an email:

“We are always exploring new ways to improve the Facebook experience, and are currently running a small test of a feature that lets you indicate that you’d like to see posts from a specific person or Page at the top of your News Feed.”