Sometimes your Facebook News Feed can look like a parade of advertisements, but all that’s about to change. The social network has a new algorithm that will soon govern your News Feed, giving content posted by your closest friends a higher priority over ads and brands.
The prioritization of friends’ posts is part of a series of updates Facebook has planned that change the way your News Feed behaves. First off, you will see more direct content from your closest connections, while branding, news, and advertising will be placed a bit lower down. Facebook has also received feedback that users don’t particularly care for receiving updates when friends like or comment on someone else’s posts, likely because it doesn’t really concern them to the first degree.
“The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day.”
Overall, your News Feed will have more content than before, and hopefully, it will contain a higher number of posts you care about. While this sounds like great news for those who habitually scroll through their News Feeds, it may cause a bit of a headache for page admins.
Facebook even informed brands that the “impact of these changes on your page’s distribution will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity. In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline.” A decline in referral traffic from Facebook isn’t something businesses with pages on the social network are likely to take lightly.
Of course, Facebook is constantly changing the format of its apps based on user feedback, so we’ll see how long this new permutation of the popular feature lasts.
