Technology is all about coming up with new strategies and trends that become a rage immediately. It’s a known fact that social media has a huge amount of attention, with the help of advertisements. With the technology industry depending so much on these revenue streams it becomes important for Social Media platforms to come up with new techniques to sustain themselves. YouTube videos for that matter have come up with ads that stream in between to get the basic revenue. Facebook have been working on a number of new techniques to get users engaging with ads, they’ve tried lots of different methods as most social media platforms have but they were having problems with the current implementation of ads.
To overcome this issue, Facebook has come up with a new idea which is the introduction of feed posts and stories in one carousel. So, the user is ultimately driven to click the news feed or story in between his or her feed. Unlike YouTube videos where you have to wait untill the ad is ver, it’s hard to miss this new ads technique. There is an option to use the same interface through a swipeable hybrid carousel containing feed posts like news or stories.
Though the release has not yet been officially announced or released by Facebook, this recent development was first covered by reverse engineering specialist Jane Manchung Wong. She got a screen recording which sent shockwaves through the ad industry.
How simple is this function? There is a header which displays the News or Story Feed Post and once you click on it, you would be able to view a full-size window of the feed. With a single swipe it can be turned into a vertical window alongside your main Facebook window which functions as a hybrid carousel.
The users can use Facebook the same way that they used, with no interruption at all. They can like, comment or share about their feed posts though the hybrid carousel is still functional. Technically speaking a vertical carousel displaying two different types of content is going to create difficulty as far as the navigation is concerned. The user has to carefully scroll through the interface to not get distracted.
With the increase in the number of people inclined to view the Stories rather than the Newsfeed section, Facebook has to make a move. A prediction by Facebook also suggests that the sharing of Stories will by and large exceed the sharing of News feeds, as is already witnessed in other social media platforms like Instagram and Whatsapp. The news feed is the place of its revenue generation. To run the show successfully there have to be some adaptations and the swipeable hybrid carousel in the pipeline by Facebook can really come as a savior for Facebook and the users as well.
Would it be welcomed by Facebook users is a question that will be answered only after the introduction of the hybrid carousels.