Facebook presented a new feature of the video center “Your Topics,” which allows you to customize your feed content to suit your interests. Today, Facebook uses algorithms to understand the interests of users. However, with the new function, users will be able to explain their claims to Facebook more accurately through subscriptions to various categories of content.
Some users already have this feature available in the app. They also reported that they received an alert in a pop-up window in the Watch app on the Facebook mobile app. The company will now focus on showing more #Topics-related videos.
“Because of the many different ways of defining your viewing feed and how videos are classified, you may see videos in your viewing feed that you are not interested in,” the post said. “Some videos related to # Themes or pages to which you are subscribed may not appear in your viewing channel,” noted in it. If you have this feature, you can access it by clicking the profile icon on the Facebook Watch tab on your mobile device and then clicking the Your Topics link to view the available categories.
The subcategories that are available for subscription are grouped under broader category pages such as Animals, Art & Design, Books, Business, Education, Fashion & Style, Food, Games, History & Philosophy, Home & Garden, Music, Performing Arts, Science, and technology, sports, travel and recreation, television and films and transport. By the way, if you get tired of the content of a particular category, then you can unsubscribe from it.
It is worth noting one nuance that may not be to everyone’s liking. You cannot only subscribe to the section. You will need to click inside it to track individual topics, for example, “Animals” => EndangeredSpecies or #GoldenRetrievers, and so on.
So far, this function is still in testing mode since, according to users, search for some topics does not return results; for example, #Corgi. It is expected that over time everything will work, and the function will be expanded.
This feature should help users personalize and filter their more comprehensive Facebook Watch feed. Filtering is also available for live broadcasts, music, shows, games, and more.
Facebook is also adding groups, such as the editorially curated “Get Caught Up” section with videos from paid partners, or those more algorithmically sorted, in other words, those that friends like.
This feature could help Facebook Watch compete with YouTube, where users initially could create subscription channels. As expected, YouTube has cleverly included themes with broad categories such as Games and Fashion and Beauty, which are now part of its main navigation. This allows users to see personalized topics at the top of the home page, which acts as a trigger to jump to the “favorite” video category instantly.
From our experience, we can say that just developing a social network is not enough. It is essential to regularly update it and supplement it with new, improved features for good user engagement, which we see on Facebook.
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