First Results From Facebook's Keyword Snooze Test Are In

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Earlier this summer Facebook started testing a new feature which would let users snooze specific keywords, to declutter their feed. Now Facebook is sharing results and key takeaways.

The team analyzed which keywords received the “snooze treatment” for a two-week span between July 27 and August 9. Facebook was able to determine not only patterns of usage, but actual insight on how people were using the feature. Despite the sample size being relatively small, the team was able to draw some interesting conclusions.

According to the report, the data collected revealed two prevalent trends: The first one described steady snoozing behaviour involving ‘evergreen’ keywords such as ‘copy and paste’, which is the common wording employed in text posts aiming at imploring users to share.

Facebook has been testing Keyword Snoozing for a while. Now the reports are in.

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The second trend had to do with spikes in the feature’s usage, potentially related to the news cycle. For instance, a pronounced spike in snoozing “Love Island” lasted from July 28. The snoozes were back to pre-spike levels as of August 1, by which point fans had presumably caught up on the grand finale. Other keyword snoozing spikes were observed during the now-famous Husky Dog incident.

That kind of information, albeit limited, was useful to the team building the feature, as it helped them experiment with shorter snoozing durations as well. However, it’s always worth noting that the availability of the feature is limited, and it’s only been rolled out to a portion of users in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Therefore, as the report suggests, the data set isn’t large enough to say anything definitive about people’s preferences.