Facebook To Modify Its Newsfeed
Facebook will modifying its News Feed making it more engaging
By the start of this week, Facebook Inc. notified that it is modifying its News Feed algorithm so that those posts which do not intrigue you are less visible on the top of your feed. Mostly, the functionality of your News Feed is governed by the things you like, comment on share with others.
To gauge a better way of making the News Feed better and intriguing, the social media giant stated that it asked more than a thousand users to rate the experience of the platform each day. Then they were asked to give feedback on the content under the Feed Quality Panel. Then the company conducted surveys involving then of thousands of individuals all over the globe so that they could learn how well the company’s feed is ranked amongst the masses. The mechanism was simple where the users were asked to rate each post from one to five stars where the question for each post remained stagnant: “how much did you want to see this story in your News Feed?”
The company observed that Facebook users had a better experience on their News Feed when the stories they came in contact were of their liking. Such stories got better rating and resulted in better engagement. Thus, taking steps ahead, the company will take these observations into consideration to modify the News Feed.
Importantly, the Facebook News Feed will start looking at the profitability that will be of your liking on the top of your feed along with the posts you like, comment or share. Both these factors will then determine what will surface as the top posts when you log in. Moreover, FB is likely to start ranking all those stories higher on the feed which it might find valuable or of human interest.
A change might also be observed in the functioning of Facebook Pages which will be based on the composition of the users along with the posting activity. Facebook claimed that these set of updates might not have an impact on referrals and traffic for the Pages.
The company mentioned in a blog post, “Some Pages may see some increases in referral traffic, and some Pages may see some declines in referral traffic. Pages might see some declines in referral traffic if the rate at which their stories are clicked on does not match how much people report wanting to see those stories near the top of their News Feed. This update helps rebalance those two factors, so people are seeing relevant stories to them.”
To outweigh the changes made to the News Feed, the masses can take advantage of the “See First” function. When the users apply “See First” to either a Page of their liking or friends, their post will surface on the top of the News Feed. The feed can also be adjusted as per your need via the drop down area present on the desktop version of the social media by selecting the “News Feed Preferences.”
