There’s a Facebook ‘Explore’ Feed we Had No Idea About and We Love It!
Hold the phone! Facebook just upped its game! If you, like me, hadn’t noticed yet, there’s a new feature to your news feed that will help you interact with more people and see more posts based on your interests. Welcome to the EXPLORE TAB! Facebook is adding an Explore tab to your news feed homepage, which is essentially a place where you can find pictures, videos, and articles that fall into thread with similar things you have liked before!
This new tab was tested on iOS in January, and they’re just starting to test it on Android for the first time with the latest beta update. At first glance, it may not look too different, but if you look closely at the bottom (or top, depending on which operating system you use) of your news feed, there should be a Home tab on the left and an Explore tab on the right.
Your Explore tab will generally include videos that are popular amongst your friends, articles that have been shared many times by your friends, and news stories that appeal to you. Everything Facebook has gathered in your Explore section is hand-picked and tailor made to your interests.
Freia Lobo reports for Mashable that this new Facebook Explore Tab is very much like the Search and Explore tab on Instagram, and it even resembles Twitter a little bit. Facebook’s intention with introducing the Explore section is to allow for its users to engage with pages they haven’t encountered yet, because pages you haven’t liked or followed won’t ever show up on your basic news feed. It broadens your choices with a specialised outlook geared towards you.
Lobo also reports that this new feature of Facebook seems to be aligned with “Facebook’s constant push for users to watch more video.” To give you an idea of how popular videos are, you can even see how many of your friends have watched it when they pop up in the Explore section.
If you don’t notice this change on your app yet, update your Facebook app and see if the Explore tab appears then. It’s not made available to everyone yet, but no need to worry it seems that the Explore tab is going to be on all of our apps in the near future. My quick, quiet down time while the kids nap just got a whole lot better!
