Facebook Makes Three Newsfeed Changes

This article originally appeared on http://sixtysecondsocialmedia.com.
Mark Dalton specialises in social media and digital marketing news. You can find him on Twitter here.

Facebook surpassed $200 billion in terms of their valuation last week, but that was not the only news from the social media giant. Following on from a busy summer where Facebook had tried several different updates to their newsfeed, such as toying with users emotions, Facebook rolled out three updates to the feed last week.

1. Facebook launches privacy checkup tool

Facebook confirmed that after several months of testing it has finally rolled out privacy checkup, a tool that helps you review control of whom you share content with. Over the coming days you may see a popup notification (if you have not had it already by now) which will take you through a few steps and which Facebook says will only take a moment to complete.

You are taken through steps to review the audience of your status updates, the apps you have used Facebook to log in to and the privacy information of key pieces of your profile. You can access the privacy checkup tool by using the icon at the top of Facebook if you do not want to wait for the popup.

2. Facebook tweaks news feed ads

Now when you hide ads on Facebook, they want to know why. This is to help serve you with more relevant ads and essentially gives more control to you over what ads you want to see without eradicating ads entirely. You can now fine tune your interests in order to see ‘better’ ads which are more relevant to what you are looking for.

Ads can be marked as spam, irrelevant, redundant, offensive, inappropriate or something else. There will also be greater weight placed onto the opinions of people who do not hide ads, the social network discovered during testing that people who rarely hide ads actually end up having around 30% fewer ads as opposed to people who use the hide ad function.

3. Facebook ads video counter

There is now a view counter on Facebook which is visible to everyone and will let you know how many people have seen what you have posted on the social network. This data is only available on content published after September 8th.

There is also a video metric dashboard now available to Page admins so that they can see the data and compare analytics over a period of time.