2015 is shaping up to be a year of social media feed updates, posing new challenges for marketers and users alike. From Twitter’s “Instant Timeline” tests to Tumblr’s additional dashboard features, social media sites are experimenting with ways to draw more users and brands.

Perhaps the biggest and long-running transformation this year will be Facebook’s, with plans to style News Feed as a digital newspaper. Late last year during his first-ever public Q&A, Mark Zuckerberg outlined his plans for our feeds, stating: “Our goal is to build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.” That means showing users tailored content from brands and individuals, based on their searches and interests. As part of Facebook’s plans for customization, last year we of course saw the launch of a new settings menu and options, allowing users to choose what they wanted to see. This feature allowed us to un-follow or re-follow other users and brand pages depending on whose content we wanted showing in our feeds. While this is already in play, we’ve seen several past attempts to do this from Facebook’s other products and features. Take Facebook’s sadly unsuccessful app last year, Paper, which allowed mobile users to select specific categories based on their interests. With this information, the app delivered human and algorithm-curated articles and photos, tailoring the experience to each user.

We also looked in a previous blog post at Facebook’s recent news-based features, Newswire and Techwire, with the former featuring newsworthy social content, and the latter focused on tech news. Both were set up to collect all news-based content shared publicly on the site by individuals and organisations, for use by journalists in their reporting. In future we will no doubt see our feeds saturated with more news content, especially if it helps Facebook foster paid relationships with publishing partners.

It’s interesting to see that Twitter is also intent on providing a personalized experience for its users, but coming from a slightly different angle than Facebook. Instead of scanning your data and interests, the platform has been testing “Instant Timelines”, a feature which scans your contacts, analyses them, and them publishes tweets to your feed which may be of interest. The unique part of this feature is that personalized tweets are still shown to users even when they are logged out of the site. Announced at a similar time to Facebook’s News Feed revelation, Twitter’s aim is instead focused on making it easier for new users to sign up and remain engaged by seeing tweets that interest them. In conjunction, we’re now also seeing other updates from the site including Quick promote, a feature that makes it easier for brands to send promoted tweets straight from their analytics dashboard, meaning we might soon start seeing an increase in the number of ad-based tweets to our timelines.

Have you noticed significant changes to your social media feeds? Do you think the changes are positive, or would you rather things remained the same? We’d love to hear your thoughts as always, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.