Facebook is making changes to the News Feed

Social Media Giant Facebook is making changes to their News Feed algorithm.

In response to user concerns that they’re missing stories from friends, Facebook is changing the News Feed algorithm to prioritize update from your friends and family above those from Pages and publishers.

“Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why today, we’re announcing an upcoming change to News Feed ranking to help make sure you don’t miss stories from your friends.”

This change will likely impact Page reach:

“…we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. 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.” 

Basically, if your posts are not generating Likes, comments and shares, this update will impact you.

Facebook’s VP of Product Management for News Feed Adam Mosseri said he expects the reach for publishers to go down a small amount but a noticeable amount”

Though, of course, “small” in this context is relative – even the slightest decline can cause a major impact for businesses that are now reliant on Facebook referrals. And there’s a lot of Page owners in that boat.

Facebook said that research has also shown them that, after friends and family, people have two other strong expectations when they come to News Feed:

• Your feed should inform. People expect the stories in their feed to be meaningful to them — and we have learned over time that people value stories that they consider informative. Something that one person finds informative or interesting may be different from what another person finds informative or interesting — this could be a post about a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news, or a recipe. We’re always working to better understand what is interesting and informative to you personally, so those stories appear higher up in your feed.
• Your feed should entertain. We’ve also found that people enjoy their feeds as a source of entertainment. For some people, that’s following a celebrity or athlete; for others it’s watching Live videos and sharing funny photos with their friends. We work hard to try to understand and predict what posts on Facebook you find entertaining to make sure you don’t miss out on those.