By now, most business owners have a Facebook page. It’s easy enough to set one up and update it, not so much keeping up with all the changes. Read on for the latest changes, and tips on how to make the most out of your page.

Users have more control over the content they see in their News Feed

Facebook’s own blog explained this perfectly stating “When you visit Facebook, you should see the things you’re most interested in…”. Rather than the Two-Option News Feed, where you could have either Top Stories (stories in order of popularity) or Most Recent (chronological order), you now get a single News Feed that shows you both top news and recent stories.

Most importantly all of these are marked with a blue triangle in the corner that you can select to either make it a 'Top Story' or 'Not a Top Story'. Facebook will use that information to automatically edit feeds.

Even if people have liked your page, your content won’t be fed regularly to them if they don’t find it interesting. Boring, or more importantly, irrelevant updates for your target market will get marked as 'Not a Top Story' and your brand will get lower visibility.

As you may have heard before, in the online space content is king, which is exactly what these Facebook changes are reinforcing loud and clear. Once you are marked as ‘Not a Top Story’ it will be hard to make it back onto that preferred list. Even if you improve your content it will be low visibility and so is unlikely to get re-marked as a 'Top Story'. This means you must think about your content strategy from the get-go! A Like is no longer enough and ‘let’s get to 10,000 Likes’ without a strategy behind it has little value.

The Ticker

The Ticker is a live-feed area that sits in the upper right corner of the Facebook page. It gives a real-time commentary of what is happening across a user’s network. Users can click on anything in the Ticker to see the full story. This offers businesses an opportunity to grab attention even if they’ve previously been relegated to 'Not a Top Story'.

Similar to Twitter, size matters here – only the first 80 characters of your post will be seen, so make it count!

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