Facebook Tests Splitting Its News Feed Into Two

Facebook is testing splitting its News Feed into two where space will be dedicated to friend updates and another space that will contain posts from pages.

The test is currently ongoing in six countries namely Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sri Lanka.

Under this impending arrangement, the main News Feed will still be populated by things shared by friends and family as well as advertisements. But posts shared by Pages — like those of publishers, for example — are moved to a secondary feed.

The tests which began last week was confirmed by Slovakian journalist Filip Struhárik. He said: “Pages are seeing dramatic drops in organic reach. The reach of several Facebook Pages fell on Thursday and Friday by two-thirds compared to previous days.”

Commenting on the test, Facebook executive Adam Mosseri said in a blog post: “We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to discover relevant content from pages they haven’t connected with yet. The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further.”

Mosseri added that the test will likely go on for months, but stressed that the company has no plans to roll it out permanently or even conduct tests outside of the six countries.