Facebook News Feed Update
Last week, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to its News Feed that reinstates what Facebook was originally about: connecting people with friends and family.
“I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions. As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard – it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”[1]
Head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri said the changes would be implemented over the coming months.
“Today we use signals like how many people react to, comment on or share posts to determine how high they appear in News Feed. With this update, we will also prioritise posts that spark conversation and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in the feed.”[2]
Posts from friends and family rather than public content will be ranked higher in the feed. Posts that prompt more discussion and interactions between people like comments, shares, and messages will be prioritised more than reactions and likes.
What are the implications?
At this early point in time, we don’t know what all the implications are. What we do know is that space in News Feed is limited and that recently brands and media publisher content has dominated Facebook to the detriment of people creating posts for friends and family. What we expect to see is people seeing less content from publishers, brands, and celebrities. But the impact to Pages will vary based on the content they produce and how people interact with them. Page posts that generate conversation among friends, such as live videos, will show higher in News Feed. More than ever, brands will need to ensure advertising is highly relevant to their target audiences and provide value to people who see them.
Facebook knows people are sharing less and less about themselves on their platform. In response, they’re making a long-term play to safeguard user participation, which ultimately retains valuable data for its advertisers and keeps people coming back. Facebook expects people will spend less time on their site and some engagement measures will decrease, but they argue your time spent will be more valuable and your experience more positive.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571
[2] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together/