We noticed a new type of notification this morning, one that comes from Facebook and informs you that a certain post on a page on which you’re an admin is “performing better than 90% of other posts on the Page.” It then suggests that you “advertise it to get even better results.”

Various WebProNews writers received this same notification this morning (we’re all admins on the WPN Facebook page). Clicking on the notification takes us to the “Advertise on Facebook” page and gets us started on setting up a promoted post with said article.

Here’s what it looks like in the notifications:

I’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the test, and will update this article accordingly.

UPDATE: Facebook has confirmed with me that this is a test that they’re running.

This isn’t the first attempt that Facebook has made in recent memory to get page owners to promote more of their posts. Last month, Facebook made a few subtle changes to Pages, including the addition of a new analytics box inside the admin panel. Facebook also softened the language of page promotion, changing the “promote” post button to one that says “boost” post.

Now users can only filter by “Highlights,” “Posts by Page,” or “Posts by Others.” The latter will naturally include posts by friends.

Facebook confirmed to Inside Facebook that the option was indeed removed:

We continue to improve pages to make them a place for people to learn and interact with different businesses. News Feed is where people can engage we posts and content from their friends and connections. Given that, we removed ‘posts by friends’ on pages. Those posts can still be seen in ‘posts by others.’

Of course, with their updated “new” news feed, Facebook added an option to filter by “All Friends,” removing page posts.

The “Post by Friends” filter was useful at times when filtering out page posts – oftentimes users want to see just what their friends had to say about a restaurant or other business. It’s likely that Facebook simply removed this option because it wasn’t being used or was deemed superfluous. Either way, it’s gone. That means that until Facebook adds posts to the content able to be found using Graph Search, there’s no real way to find out what a friend said about that new local brewery.

First up, you may have seen the new post analytics box at the top of your admin panel. It shows all of your promotable posts (links, photos, etc.), their total reach, and their paid reach. There’s also a button to quickly promote each individual post:

The other is simply a terminology shift. Instead of offering admins the ability to “promote” post, Facebook is now saying they can “boost” posts. I guess “boost” sounds better that “promote.” Clicking on “boost post” brings up the same Promoted Post menu that you’re used to.

Earlier this year, Facebook came under fire over their Promoted Posts feature. Some page owners accused Facebook of pulling the old “bait-and-switch” by burying pages’ content in order to force them to pay for promotion. Facebook vehemently denied this.

Back in December, Facebook announced that about 300,000 pages had paid to promote at least one post. Doing the math, that meant that just of 2% of local businesses pages had utilized the feature. Facebook also said that 2.5 million individual posts had been promoted, meaning that the average page owner who utilizes Promoted Posts promotes a little over 8 posts. These figures are now a few months old, but it gives us a little insight into how much attention page owners were giving the Promoted Post option about 7 months in. Now, we’re coming up on one year of Facebook opening up Promoted Posts to page owners.

“Each day, millions of people visit Facebook Pages – with almost half accessing them from their mobile phones. Today, we’ve developed a new mobile Pages layout tailored to the way people look for information on their mobile devices. It’s now easier for your customers to interact with your Page in a way that’s both efficient and useful,” says Facebook.

Here’s what the new pages design looks like on iOS:

You’ll immediately notice that Facebook has moved many of the action buttons to a single row on the top. This includes “like,” “check-in,” “call,” and “more.” Right below that, you’ll see a map view. That’s followed by directions, hours, and prices (if applicable).

Below that, you’ll see more real estate given to star ratings and user reviews. The “write post” button has been removed from view – and been replaced by a big “write recommendation” button. It’s clear that Facebook wants you to bulk up places’ ratings and reviews, instead of simply writing something like “hey, love the place” on its Timeline.

Below that, you’ll see photos from the page, scrollable from side-to-side. In all, Facebook has not only made mobile pages better looking (a generally improved aesthetic), but they’ve taken all the important information and put it front and center on the page.

For page owners, there are a couple of other benefits from the redesign:

Higher-appearing pinned posts: You can pin important posts (including Facebook Offers or videos) from your desktops.These posts are now front and center when Pages are accessed on mobile devices.

Easier mobile management: You now have the ability to easily switch between public and admin views directly from your mobile Pages/devices.

The mobile pages redesign is visible today on iOS and Facebook on the web. They say that it will be coming to Android devices soon.

And and automatic link to the relevant Facebook page, which is the key aspect of this new feature.

Starting today, Facebook is rolling out the new sharing option to U.S. users. The rollout will take a couple of weeks, according to the company. What you’ll find is the inline ability to share action verb statuses – “feeling,” “watching,” or “drinking,” for instance.

“Josh Wolford is watching Jurassic Park,” maybe. Alongside the statues will we a little icon specific to the action (for watching, a little movie cut scene board. The object of the action will also get its own link in your status – leading users to its Facebook page.

It will also be added to the appropriate box in your Timeline (Movies box, in this case).

As we touched on back in January when Facebook first began to test these action-based statuses, this is clearly not just Facebook bringing back emoticons for the hell of it.

At the time, Facebook said:

“It’s just a new way for people to visually represent what they’re doing and how they’re feeling through their Facebook posts. It will only be available to small set of people. This isn’t integrated into Graph Search. It’s just a small test to see if people are interested in sharing their actions in a more visual way.”

But you have to imagine that this sort of data could be integrated into Graph Search. Using an action status already automatically adds the direct object of the actions (whether it be a movie, food, book, musical artist, etc) to your Timeline.

“These updates, and the stories added to your timeline, respect the privacy settings you choose for your post,” says Facebook. So as long as you have your privacy settings tooled correctly, these action statuses shouldn’t open you up any more than a regular status update or “liking” the product in question would.

But this structured status update makes it much easier for Facebook to collect data on your activities, the same way they do with Open Graph actions. And more information means that Facebook knows which pages to suggest to you, and which ads to target you in both the news feed and otherwise. It’s also another format for Facebook to use in Sponsored Stories. If you post one of these action statuses that says you were drinking coffee at Starbucks, you know that at some point, your friends will be shown that status as a sponsored post in their news feed. It’s simply Facebook taking the page-tagging out of your hands, and doing it for you.

Is it a data grab? Sure. But as Facebook says, it’s also a fun new way to more visually express your activities. Use it or not, it’s up to you. Which is the great thing about all social media, really. You give up just as much data as you want to give up.

Starting today, you can choose to turn on Replies for your page. The new feature changes the way post comments are shown and organized, and it allows users to reply directly to other comments on the post, creating comment threads.

“Today, we’re improving the quality of conversations on Pages with Replies. Reply directly to comments left on your Page and start a conversation thread. The most active and engaging conversations will be shown at the top of your posts,” says Facebook.

The new Replies feature is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of commenting on the post in general, or tagging a user in your comment in order to show that you’re responding directly to them, now you can simply reply to their comment inside the page post. It’s a feature that Facebook has had for a while on their Facebook commenting plugin for sites, and it will no doubt make conversations inside heavily-commented page posts much easier to follow.

The new ranking system that sorts conversations should also help to bring the best comment threads to the top. Facebook says that the new system is based on which conversations are the most “active and engaging,” which most likely means the conversations that contain the most likes and individual replies. We heard last week that the algorithm also takes into account your connections, so you could see a different comment on the top of a post than your friend does – depending on who you know. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more explanation on this and will update you when we hear back.

Starting today, you should be able to opt-in to the new comment structure. Simply go to your page, click “edit page,” and go to “manage permissions.” If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you should see you should see a Replies filter box you can check off to “Allow replies to comments on my Page.” It should be under “Post privacy gating.”

Or, Facebook may prompt you to turn on Replies when you visit your page.

For now, the new replies are opt-in only, and once you opt-in, there’s no opting-out. But starting July 10th, Facebook says they’ll be rolling it out to all pages. If your page has more than 10,000 likes, the new Replies will be turned on automatically.

Now, that feature is about to go live.

Facebook tells TechCrunch that the new threaded comments will rollout on Monday, on an opt-in basis. That period will last a few months, and Facebook will eventually push the new system to everyone in July.

“We think this update will allow for easier management of conversations around posts, which is a better experience for people interacting with Pages and public figure profiles,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

Basically, the new comment threads let users reply to individual comments. So instead of one long flow of comments, which can be confusing, you will be able to follow entire conversations based on one original comment.

And the best comments should rise to the top. Facebook’s new algorithm makes sure that you see the comments that are the most engaging – meaning having the most likes and replies. The algorithm also takes into account your connections, so you could see a different comment on the top of a post than your friend does – depending on who you know.

Here’s what the comment threading will look like courtesy of the Huffington Post, who is already using the new system. As you can see, users are now able to comment on other comments. The cream has been pulled to the top, if you will, with the most engaging comment thread appearing at the top:

Not everyone is getting comment threading and the new ranking. It will only be an option for pages with over 10,000 followers, and it won’t be available for personal accounts at all. It’s also not going to be available on mobile – but Facebook hopes to add that functionality soon.

Although the terms page says that the last revision occurred on December 17th, there has definitely been some changes to to the “cover” section.

Before the change, Facebook was pretty strict when it came to what can go in a page’s cover photo. Here’s what the guidelines used to prohibit:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40 percent off,” or, “Download it on socialmusic.com.”
• Contact information such as a website address, email, mailing address, or information that should go in your page’s “about” section.
• References to Facebook features or actions, such as like or share, or an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features.
• Calls to action, such as “get it now” or “tell your friends.”

These restrictions have been removed.

Now, Facebook only enforces the “no images with more than 20% text” rule, among other, more general rules that are enforced on all products across the site:

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines. Covers may not include images with more than 20% text.

So, if you’ve been dying to throw some text about a deal you’re offering into your cover photo, I guess you can feel free to do so. I’ve reached out to Facebook for confirmation.

[Mari Smith via AllFacebook]

“Our mission is to make the world more open and connected,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Thursday’s event. “[And] news feed is one of the most important services that we build.”

“Our goal…is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper.”

Were you ready for a news feed refresh? What are your first impressions? Let us know in the comments.

The new Facebook news feed is “designed to reduce clutter and focus more on stories from the people you care about,” says Facebook. “We’ve completely rebuilt each story to be much more vibrant and colorful and highlight the content that your friends are sharing. Photos, news articles, maps and events all look brighter and more beautiful.”

And that’s one of the main things that this news feed refresh is all about: an enhanced visual experience. Along with content-specific feeds that give users more freedom and mobile consistency, that makes up the three key points about the new news feed that Facebook hammered home on Thursday. Here’s what you need to know about what’s changing.

A More Visual User Experience

So, what’s going to change for the average user? Quite a bit, actually – both in how it looks and how you actually navigate around the network.

First, the desktop look. It’s cleaner, more visually stunning, and yes, it feels a bit more mobile-inspired. Everything is more photo-oriented, and those photos are given much more prominence inside the news feed. Photos that your friends post are huge, spanning all the way across the feed. Photo albums are also larger. Facebook says that they want to be able to make the story, as it appears in the news feed, more visually indicative of the experience. For instance, this story about a friend going to China gives a big, bold, photo-oriented snapshot of the trip:

And it’s not just photos from friends that are more visual. It’s shared articles, which feature larger images and more information like snippets and author & publication info:

And events:

And links that your friends share, which now feature profile cards on the left-hand side that show you exactly who has shared the same link. You can hover over each friend to see what they said about the link when they shared it:

Stories about your friends making new friends now feature snippets from Timelines:

Check-ins are also more visual with large map images, as is content from third-party sites like Pinterest. Overall, you’re going to see a news feed that doesn’t just highlight images, but is inundated with them. At Thursday’s event, Zuckerberg said that nearly half of the news feed already consists of photos and other visual content – so this redesign is simply an expression of the evolving face of the feed.

New Ways to Navigate

As expected, the new Facebook news feed will also sport content-specific news feeds. You’ll still have the classic news feed as the default, which will combine recent activity with “top posts.” You’ll also still have the opportunity to filter the feed by “most recent,” which will show you everything from both friends and pages in chronological order.

Facebook’s new, hyper-specific news feed options include “all friends,” which shows a stream of all activity from friends (nothing from pages or people that are simply “followed”). There are also specific feeds for photos, music, games, groups, and more.

The old “pages feed” has a new name: “Following.” It will unearth all the posts from pages and people that you follow (no friends).

In other words, Facebook is giving you more options for customizing your news feed experience.

Long story short, Facebook has given users a lot more choice in how they browse content on the site. And the prominent placement of the specific news feeds on the homepage nearly ensures that users are at least tempted to spend more time on the site. By delving into a specific content feeds like “music” or “photos,” users can unearth posts from the deep, dark, cavernous void of Facebook content that’s been cast aside by their ranking algorithms. When there’s more to explore, people typically choose to explore it – at least that’s Facebook’s hope. And more people spending more time on the site means more chances to serve ads.

The third tenet of Facebook’s news feed redesign is mobile consistency – meaning that your experience on the desktop, web, and apps across all platforms should feel fluid. As I mentioned before, the new Facebook desktop experience feels more mobile – at least more streamlined.

All of your Facebook extras, your events, messages, gifts, apps, and more, are now housed on the left-hand side inside cute little icons. Like mobile, this is accessible from anywhere you go on the desktop version. In fact, Facebook made a point at Thursday’s event to say that “now you can get to any page on Facebook to any other page on Facebook without going to your homepage.”

Facebook chat has also been resigned to the left in the new news feed. Facebook said that the reason for this is to get more people to see it. Some desktop users simply didn’t have the screen capabilities to see the chat information on the right-hand side.

Facebook’s mobile experience for the new news feed is going to look and feel just like the desktop experience. That’s the bottom line. With this refresh, Facebook is no longer allowing any light between the two. Your Facebook news feed is your Facebook news feed – it doesn’t matter how you access it.

It seems that this is what Facebook means when they say “goodbye clutter,” and that they want to get Facebook “out of the way” of the Facebook experience.

The Business of Business

So you know that with the new news feed, photos are both bigger and more prominent. You couldn’t have thought that ads were going to stay the same, right?

Yes, ads in your news feed will be getting bigger.

“We’re taking all the content you see in the feed and making it more immersive. So that goes across the board for everything, including ads,” said Facebook’s Julie Zhuo.

As a marketer, this presents plenty of new opportunities. Promoted Posts, Sponsored Stories, and Page promotion ads almost have to be visually impressive in order to flow with the rest of the news feed. If marketers didn’t see the advantage of developing striking, image-based ads before, this must surely be a wakeup call – that’s the future of ads on Facebook.

If you operate a Facebook Page, there are both good and bad aspects of Facebook’s news feed redesign. The good is that there’s a new “following”-only news feed option, so users have the opportunity to browse an unadulterated stream of content from business and interest pages. And the option to browse this specific feed is given prime placement on the homepage. In light of the recent hullabaloo of page owners accusing Facebook of decreasing post visibility to promote their Promoted Posts product, this feed option should be welcomed with open arms.

But it’s still just an option. And whether or not users choose to utilize that option remains to be seen.

Now for the bad: to compliment the “following” feed, there’s also an “all friends” feed that weeds out all page posts. Bummer.

Overall, the more visual news feed can only help business pages. Remember the aforementioned Timeline snippets that pop up when a user’s friend makes friends with another user? Well, that concept also applies to pages. When a user likes a new page, a visual snippet of that page’s Timeline will appear in the news feed. This gives pages a chance to make a bold first impression, increasing the likelihood that a user will choose to visit or like the page on the spot.

Facebook Tells Developers to Prepare

Everything is larger and more visual in the new news feed, and app developers have to prepare for this as well.

Facebook is suggesting that developers begin to optimize for high-res feed stories (on both desktop and mobile):

In the new design, the things people share through apps are larger and more engaging in News Feed. We’re also making it easier for people to access their game and music feeds, now accessible from the top right area. To take advantage of this new design, we encourage you to optimize for high-resolution feed stories on both web and mobile by providing 600X600 pixel images (minimum 200X200 px).

These images will be really important to game developers as Bookmarks will become more important in the news feed. Bookmarks are images that accompany a shared story about a game. The larger image size means may just be what it takes to convince new and returning players to check out your game.

“These ever-present bookmarks will also display the notification counter from the most recent game requests to help drive re-engagement with players,” says Facebook.

So, there you go. Facebook has just unveiled the most dramatic redesign of its most important product in years. All that’s left to know is the “when?”

Not soon, probably. At least for most of you. Facebook has said that this will be a slow, careful rollout so that they can get their ducks in a row. It’s a big change to a big product, and they want to make sure it’s right before handing it over to everyone in the world. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone, considering they’re currently doing the same sort of slow rollout with Graph Search.

There is one thing you can do, however, to improve your chances of getting the new news feed before your friends. You can go to facebook.com/about/newsfeed and join the waiting list. All you have to do it click a big, green button. You can’t miss it.

From what you’ve seen, what do you think? Good for users? Good for businesses? Let us know in the comments.

A few months later, Facebook extended the Promoted Posts functionality to individual users. By October, anyone with an account could pay to promote their witty status, cool new article, or cute new baby photo.

Ok, cool. So far so good. You may think that the entire Promoted Posts concept is wacky, but hey, to each his own. As a page owner, you could simply choose not to participate in Promoted Posts and go about your business as usual – simply posting away.

As a page owner, have you seen your average engagement decrease since the launch of Promoted Posts? Have you used Promoted Posts? Let us know in the comments.

Of course, that zen-like mentality could quickly disappear if, let’s say, Facebook was rigging the game. And that’s exactly what some page owners began accusing Facebook of late last year: one giant bait-and-switch.

The “Bait-and-Switch”

Reports emerged that Facebook was deliberately decreasing the reach of regular, non-promoted posts in order to force people into paying for the Promoted Post product. In fact, that was the whole point of unveiling the feature – to cast un-promoted posts into oblivion so that people would see such a small return (likes, comments, and shares) that they would have no choice but to pay to promote.

Most of the claims hinged on the simple observation by the accusers that posts published on their Facebook pages were not driving the traffic that they used to – which naturally meant that not as many people were seeing the posts in their news feeds. How could my likes be increasing, but my traffic from Facebook be decreasing?

The common conclusion from people like Richard Metzger at Dangerous Times and even popular Facebook celebrities like George Takei (who hopped on the bandwagon) was that Facebook was turning down the volume on their regular posts.

Although the accusation gained plenty of steam inside the tech media circles, Facebook maintained its innocence in the matter. The company said, point blank, that they did not decrease the visibility of page posts in order to force people into buying Promoted Posts.

And there was some pretty compelling evidence to support Facebook’s innocence. Facebook has admitted that only around 16% or so of a page’s followers even see their posts in the news feed. It’s always been like this. Facebook has never been able to show 100% of followers 100% of posts from pages and people they subscribe to. There’s simply too much competition for real estate in the news feed. As users begin to friend more and more people and like more and more pages, their overall engagement with each individual person and page is going naturally decrease.

Josh Constine over at TechCrunch suggested that a move that Facebook made to fight spam had actually been one of the root causes of the so-called “visibility decreases” that many page owners were reporting.

“We made a relatively large ranking change in September that was designed to reduce spam complaints from users. We used [spam] reports at an aggregate level to find Pages or apps generating a lot of reports [and decrease their reach]. We’ve also added personalized attempts to reduce presence of posts you’re likely to complain about,” said Facebook.

In short, the less engaging your posts were, the less likely they were to show up in your followers’ news feeds.

And the push to control spammy posts is simply one news feed algorithm tweak that Facebook made – and they make a bunch, all the time. Facebook is constantly changing the way its algorithms decide what shows up in whose news feed. The bottom line, according to those who believed Facebook, was that sure, your post reach could be fluctuating (or even simply decreasing), but it’s not because Facebook is pulling a bait-and-switch with Promoted Posts.

Still, page owners continued to complain that for them, personally, they were seeing less return from their posts. Sure, you can throw graphs and excuses at the issue, but you can’t explain that the decrease in visibility coincided with the dawn of Promoted Posts. Although Facebook has been adamant that they are not pulling this “bait-and-switch,” many page owners and public figures with many subscribers have remained unconvinced.

New Accusations

Fast forward to a couple of days ago and to an article by Nick Bilton in the the New York Times’ “Bits” tech blog. It begins, “something is puzzling on Facebook.”

What it asserts is the same argument that we discussed above: Facebook is screwing you. Hard.

His story picks up soon after Facebook first allowed users to “subscribe” to public figures back in 2011. At that point, he had about 25,000 subscribers and his average article post on Facebook would receive a few hundred likes and at least a few dozen shares (535 likes and 53 shares or 323 likes and 88 shares, numbers like that).

Today, he has over 400,000 subscribers. If you think that means the number of likes and shares per post will have increased 16-fold, you’re wrong.

“From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred,” says Bilton.

So, he tested out a Promoted Post. After paying $7 to get one of his article posts promoted by Facebook, he says that he saw a 1,000% increase in interaction in a few hours.

“It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for,” he concludes.

Fact Check

Although Facebook has been denying this claim for months and months, this week was the first time that they published a lengthy “fact check” post on the topic.

In it, Facebook unequivocally states that it’s a false allegation.

“There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true.”

Facebook says that in reality, engagement has increased among people who allow subscribers – 34%, in fact. That means likes, comments, and shares.

“News Feed shows the most relevant stories from your friends, people you follow and Pages you are connected to. In fact, the News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm in that we don’t replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones,” says Facebook.

The “fact check” post seems to stem directly from and come as a pointed rebuttal to Bilton’s NYT article. Twice, Facebook makes a point to say that you can’t just compare anecdotal evidence from separate posts that occurred years apart.

The argument here is based on a few anecdotes of one post from one year to a totally different post from another year.This is an apples-to-oranges comparison; you can’t compare engagement rates on two different posts year over year.

For early adopters of Follow, we do see instances where their follower numbers have gone up but their engagement has gone down from a year ago. When we first launched Follow, the press coverage combined with our marketing efforts drove large adoption. A lot of users started following public figures who had turned on Follow. Over time, some of those users engaged less with those figures, and so we started showing fewer stories from those figures to users who didn’t engage as much with their stories. The News Feed changes we made in the fall to focus on higher quality stories may have also decreased the distribution for less engaging stories from public figures.

Read: that aforementioned spam adjustment. Facebook is saying that yes, we adjust the news feed algorithm to show users more relevant posts, but we are in no way decreasing organic reach to force our Promoted Posts product on people.

All this being said, Facebook is taking it head on. For many Facebook users, trust in Big Blue isn’t a common emotion. For page owners and popular figures who have seen their engagement decline, it may be hard to swallow that there’s not something malicious going on here.

Do you believe Facebook when they say that they are not decreasing visibility of non-promoted posts in order to generate revenue from Promoted Posts? Let us know in the comments.