Facebook pushed out a change to its Newsfeed today: It will promote updates that include links posted by Pages over posts from the same accounts without links. This means when the people running a Page account post a simple status update, it won’t show up on the Newsfeeds of followers as frequently as their posts that share links.
In a blog post, Facebook product manager Chris Turitzin elaborated on the change, noting that Facebook found users engage more when they see text updates from people they are friends with on the social network, but that text updates from Pages did not inspire similar enthusiasm. ” We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types,” he wrote.
Turitzin then gave some advice to Pages users who are wondering what type of content they should publish, urging the page runners to share links by using Facebook’s “Share” function instead of just embedding them into a post.
Looking over some big-name Facebook Pages, it becomes apparent that most successful brands are already linking to images, video, and outside articles. I looked at Starbucks, Katy Perry, Red Bull…even Justin Bieber – the guy who peed in a bucket, caused $20,000 in damages by throwing eggs, and got caught on a sex tour – is doing this correctly. So I’m guessing the kinds of companies and celebrities with money to spend on analytics have already figured out that sharing content other than text does better with viewers.
