Facebook is to give greater weight to posts from individuals rather than corporations in a change to its newsfeed likely to affect traffic to publishers.
In a posting on its Newsfeed blog, Facebook said that it was planning to make an “upcoming change to News Feed ranking to help make sure you don’t miss stories from your friends”.
Facebook already decides which posts are prioritised in your newsfeed based on how much you share, like or comment on different kinds of posts from different sources.
The change means that posts from Facebook groups or the pages of brands including publishers such as the Guardian, BuzzFeed or New York Times are less likely to appear at the top of people’s newsfeeds.
The post warns that pages with less sharable content will see referral traffic to their sites from Facebook fall.
“Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some pages,” wrote Facebook’s vice president for newsfeed product management, Adam Mosseri.
“For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through page posts. We encourage pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends.”
The impact of the change on different kinds of publishers is uncertain.Online only publishers such as BuzzFeed rely more on their own Facebook pages to seed their content on social networks, they are also adept at making content that people want to interact with on social networks. In contrast, the bulk of content from more traditional publishers is not designed specifically with sharing in mind.
In announcing the changes, Facebook also for the first term unveiled the “values” it says it uses to oversee the newsfeed. These are:
- Family and friends come first – meaning that those Facebook users you are closest to and interact with most will appear higher up in your timeline. Within this first value Facebook also says it will prioritise posts that “inform” and “entertain”.
- A platform for all ideas – Facebook will not pick and choose which sources or ideas are present in the newsfeed so that it is “inclusive of all perspectives and view points” as long as they follow community standards.
- Authentic communication – Facebook will try to weed out posts which mislead users, such as fake news stories.
- You control your experience – Providing tools such as the ability to hide or report posts for people to actively tailor their timeline.
- Constant iteration – which means Facebook will continue to tweak the newsfeed.
The changes come just two months after another recent change to the algorithm two months ago which was designed to increase the rankings of content that people spend a greater amount of time reading. That shift was welcomed by many publishers, some of whom are concerned that the more weighty content they produce may be valuable to those who read it on Facebook, but won’t receive as many shares, comments or likes because of the subject matter.
Source: The Guardian
Author: Jasper Jackson
