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Facebook Explore Feed: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
 Facebook Explore Feed: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 1000 524 Asith Hettiarachchi
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Is Explore Feed Going To Be The Death Of Facebook Organic Reach?

Would all the money, time and effort spent on growing your Facebook page likes going to be in vain soon?

Well, this is a burning question most of the brands are wondering from the day they noticed the new testing feed on Facebook; Explore Feed.

Launched last month as an isolated test, the feed has already started to make the publishers in Sri Lanka panic. The test currently runs in 6 countries including Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala and Cambodia.

In this post, we plan to have a look at this New Feed of Facebook, its advantages and more to help brands use Facebook marketing with clear answers.

What is Explore feed?


Basically, the Explore Feed presents all the organic brand content from publishers and businesses- which used to be in your news feed, thereby splitting the main feed or the news feed into two different divisions. This leaves the news feed only with posts from family and friends and all the other promoted posts.

You can find the Explore Feed on the left sidebar once you Sign in to Facebook which available in both mobile and desktop versions.

The same new feed has been launched throughout the world apart from the six countries mentioned with one difference; as a complementary feed of popular posts automatically customized for each person’s interest.

Advantages and disadvantages

advantages-and-disadvantages
Since Sri Lanka has already become a Guinea pig in this infant test by Facebook, having a deeper understanding of the explore feed is important in order to survive in Facebook marketing, incase the feed becomes more than just a test. Therefore we have listed advantages and disadvantages of the explore feed below.

Advantages

  • Allows users to see posts from their family and friends separately from brand content.
  • Ad-free. This gives more room for organic content.
  • Enable users with more opportunities to discover relevant brands as the new feed follows an algorithm that presents content based on relevance and user interest even from pages they haven’t followed or liked yet.

Disadvantages

  • People may not see posts from the pages they follow.
  • Reduces organic reach of all pages a great deal
  • This in turn, badly affects the pages with a small marketing budget as paid advertisements seem to be the most efficient way to get your content on the right screens.
  • Difficult to access the feed on mobile browsers, which again impact negatively on organic reach of pages.

Will you have to pump more and more money into Facebook as the organic search is about to die? Or will this go the other way around as now you have more free space for brand content?

Although we cannot predict anything on advertising CPI (Cost Per Impression) as no one has a clear idea how the algorithm of this new feed works, we are sure on one thing; Facebook’s goal here is to see the user preference to see content from friends and family in a separate feed from public and brand content.

There’s still a silver lining

Yes. It’s already affected the Sri Lankan brands throwing marketers into panic mode. However the silver lining here is that it hasn’t been permanently implemented. Hear it from the Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed

There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore.

The Underappreciated Beauty of Animation
 The Underappreciated Beauty of Animation 1024 536 Asith Hettiarachchi
By:

Let your Imagination run wild! What do you have to lose?

“Animation is not a Genre, it is an Artform” – Brad Bird

Video is one of the most effective ways of immediately creating a lasting impact. So it’s not a wonder that it’s one of the most sought-after modes of communication, advertising and entertainment. Irrespective of industry, message or intention, videos remain right at the top.

In our first Blog Edition, we will look at the beauty of Animation and reveal a little surprise that we have up our sleeve.

Animation is not a spontaneous artform, it has to be carefully and meticulously crafted with a lot of hard work. But, if you do it right, viewers will not be aware of the complexities involved.

2D and 3D animations are at the core of what we do, specializing in producing videos to communicate our client’s message to their target audience. Limitless imagination, brainstorming and ideas generate such results and complete a project at optimal quality.

If one tries to control the process unnecessarily, the process is limited. Constraints are something that we have learnt to screen out of our creative processes, so that creativity takes over.

With widely available talent, locally and worldwide, and globalization that allows sharing of information, ideas and skills, it is a prerequisite that one must be ever-evolving with the latest trends and technology. Thus, bringing us to the revelation of 2D animation to imitate 3D movements. Yes, you read right.

Let me to break that down if it seems too complicated.

Think of cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, Popeye, or even our modern-day Ben 10; these fall into the category of 2D animations. On the other hand, 3D animations would be Despicable Me, Pets and Ice Age.

In order to demonstrate the difference using our in-house productions, below you will find a 2D video we had produced for one of our clients in relation to their new online platform for selling authentic Sri Lankan books online at minimal prices to Sri Lankans all over the world:

Purelankan – The Sri Lankan eBook Store. View more here.

On the other hand, below you will find a 3D animated rig model:

3D Animations (Unicorn and Hulk). View more here.

See the difference?

The characters in the initial video do not have human-like or realistic movements, whereas the second one does. The movements are generated through the use of a method called ‘Rigging’.

If you are familiar with the world of animation, you must be aware that there are numerous animated layers that go into the complete movement of the character. Rigging and imitating human like movements can be done through manually selecting the area of the character’s body that will be used as pivot points to animate these actions.

Rigging is the process of creating connections between objects to make animating easier.

There are two options;

  1. Controls can be created
  2. One object can be controlled by another; similar to a Parent-Child relationship.

Rigging enables more efficient animation. Without the use of rigging, one would need to animate each part of the character through use of Key Frames, Rotation and Translation for each individual movement frame by frame.

Our evolved method of production now enables 3D effects to appear on 2D animations. Here rigging is used to ensure this happens.

Demonstration below:

The beauty of this method is that one does not need to go to the extent of generating 3D videos to imitate real life scenarios.

It goes without saying that when it comes to animations, there are certain levels of expectations especially with modern-day technological and graphical advances.

Audiences are awed and appreciate work that is closer to life, as they find it easier to see themselves in the position of using or experiencing the product or surroundings respectively.

We believe this effect will satisfy that expectation. We can satisfy this expectation.

Click here for more information on our portfolio.