Now you have the opportunity to ONLY see the people you want when you login to Facebook. And so does everyone else:
“Users can now add friends to an “Acquaintances” list whose members will appear less frequently in the news feed, and a “Close Friends” list of people who will appear more frequently in news feed and whose updates will trigger notifications.”–source
As more and more people join and add friends to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn, the need for curation of social networks becomes even greater.
Curation must be done manually AND by the technology of the social networks in order to bring the greatest value to the users. I’ve been using Twitter lists avidly for six months now; 95% of my time is spent in these lists, which is why I’m following much less people these days on Twitter.
Appear Less Frequently
As much as we all enjoy adding our high school friends on Facebook, seeing their updates on a regular basis rarely delivers significant value. Notice that this is not a complete hiding of people, but a measured decrease in their visibility on one’s newsfeed.
Appear More Frequently
Out of the total number of friends I have on Facebook I estimate that I interact with only 100 of them regularly throughout the week, and less than 25 intentionally (in terms of checking their profile, liking or commenting on their updates, or sending a private message). I would love it if my Top News section only featured those 100 people, and featured those 25 most prominently.
Content Will Improve
If you are trying to reach, engage, or interact with specific groups of people on Facebook your content will have to improve. It’s no longer about quantity, but quality. Starting more groups or pages, or publishing more mundane updates that most of your audience knows already will be completely irrelevant. This is exciting!
Great Tips on How to Set Up Your Own List
“When you do follow someone, create a list and add them to a specific category that will help you remind yourself how you found them. I create lists on Tweetdeck to ensure that the people I’ve followed are categorized so that I can quickly remember where I met them, how I met them, and I can easily pinpoint their tweets online. Lists also have a great value in your marketing segmentation efforts.”–source
Will you use Facebook lists actively? What percentage of your newsfeed cluttered with irrelevant updates?
I think that the word “improved” needs to have an asterisk after it. I’m current reading The Filter Bubble and I’m becoming less convinced that all of the curation is a good thing. It “protects” us from views we don’t want to see, people that challenge us and messages that we’d rather ignore.
I know that there is a value to it, i spend most of my twitter time in tweet deck because of the columns and the lists that help me pay better attention to the messages I want, but I force myself to delve into my general feed and the Facebook “recent” feed once per social-media-day so that I can catch the things that my intentional and Facebook’s automatic curators are keeping from me.
Valuable, perhaps, but the jury is still out on “better” I might say.
i would say you are in the minority–you have already curated your feeds, see the value of the general feed, but still spend the majority of your time in your feeds.
the masses right have not curated their feeds, and continue to add people to their networks–my wife just created her first list two weeks ago.
as you know facebook lists were there before Google+, but no one used them. the competition and buzz caused them to bring them back.
i’m on the hunt for data on user satisfaction with their fb news feed–top news is 50% right for me–with all of fb’s data and my desire to curate that number should be around 80%.
i somewhat agree w what you are saying but i would say overall curation/lists are good because the more satisfied uses are w their networks, the more time they spend, which gives them more time to browse both their lists and newsfeeds.
sounds like an interesting book! going to check it out!