Mentioned on the Facebook Newsroom earlier today, the social network has increased pressure on pages that publish low-quality content in hopes of attracting attention or social interaction. Specifically, Facebook will be demoting content that users beg for likes, shares and comment as well as content that’s too frequently shared and link-based posts that are deemed as spam by Facebook users. By devaluing this content within the Facebook feed, users will be exposed to more high-quality content each day.
Regarding content that Facebook has called “like-bait,” posts will be devalued when the original poster asks for artificial social inflation. According to a study conducted by Facebook, representatives of the social network discovered “like-baiting stories are, on average, 15 percent less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares.” The changes that have gone live today will reduce the number of stories that include phrases such as “Like, Share or Comment” in the post, image description or even the image.
Interestingly, Facebook is pushing pages to share more original content rather than recycled content found around the Web. According to the same study, Facebook discovered that users are more likely to complain and potentially de-fan a page when the page admin posts a piece of content that’s already made the rounds on the social network. After Facebook started reducing the emphasis of these page posts, people are hiding approximately 10 percent fewer fan page stories.
The final change focuses on reducing the number of spam links that are listed within the feed. Facebook will be measuring how often a visited link is liked or shared with a friend on Facebook. Thus highly original, interesting content should receive more social interactions and exposure of that content will increase on the feed. Vica versa, low-quality, spammy links will be devalued in the feed.
