Facebook rolled out significant changes to the core user experience, likely in preparation for the F8 developer conference that starts tomorrow. Overall, Facebook is giving users more control over what content is included in their experience, offering tools to manually choose whose content is shown and how often. For brands, this means that the visibility of their content is no longer entirely at the mercy of EdgeRank, but rather is increasingly up to each individual fan.

News Feed – Now all news stories are shown in a single, scrollable view. Top Stories, which have received the most engagement from other users, are featured first, followed by a chronological list of all recent stories. Built in to each story are user-configured filtering tools which allow blocking and whitelisting of particular individuals.

News Ticker – Similar to a Twitter feed, the news ticker is a condensed feed in the top right corner of the screen that displays short, concise messages like status updates and summaries of full-length stories.

Lists – To match the popular Circles functionality on Google+, Facebook has made it easier to organize friends and brand pages into lists. This feature has been available for a couple of weeks, but it’s now prominently featured on the redesigned home page. With these lists, users can see content from friends and brands they care about in one stream as well as share updates with this select audience.

Subscriptions – Borrowing heavily from Twitter, subscriptions are a new way for users to connect to one another without the need for a mutual relationship. These one-way relationships provide news feed content from other users’ accounts, and subscribers can also control how much they see from the individual, whether it’s a journalist or a celebrity. Currently this feature is not yet available for brand pages.

With these major updates to how content is surfaced and shared in a user’s stream, brands must have a long-term strategy to deliver useful content that truly engages fans and relates to their interests rather than chasing the one-time gratification of Likes. Brands should also be prepared to supplement-and support-this content with paid media in the form of Sponsored Stories to drive visibility in fans’ news feeds and among their friends. Overall, these changes ultimately provide brands with the opportunity to earn users’ loyalty and get into their inner circle by becoming truly social; in other words, more like a close friend than a faceless brand. Over the next few weeks, brands must keep an eye on engagement analytics, as these are likely to fluctuate with the new user experience and may necessitate a new strategy.