Facebook has just announced that they have updated their News Feed algorithm so that it takes into account more user feedback and survey information. This will push things like likes, comments and shares down in regards to the influence they have on what people see in their News Feed.
The user feedback and survey information is largely going to be from in-feed user surveys and feedback they get from their Feed Quality Panel. These two items are put out by Facebook to learn more about what people like and don’t like to see in their News Feed.
Facebook said that this update won’t likely cause a significant change in regards to the traffic that people see right away. In the announcement for this update they said, “We saw through our research that people reported having a better News Feed experience when the stories they see at the top are stories they are both likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with.”
This essentially means that pages that get a lot of clicks or likes, but don’t rank well in the surveys, are going to be less popular. To put it simply, the ‘click bait’ or ‘like bait’ type posts on Facebook are going to become less effective in the near future.
Facebook also said in the announcement, “We are making an update to the News Feed that combines these two signals. News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story. We will rank stories higher in feed which we think people might take action on, and which people might want to see near the top of their News Feed.”
This does seem to make it clear that while likes, comments and shares are still important, they are far from the only thing Facebook is going to be looking at. This is just one more step by Facebook to try to get marketers and page owners to push out quality content to people who will actually benefit from it rather than just catchy headlines or pointless memes to get people to click, comment or share.
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