Facebook Changes What You’ll See In News Feed

Facebook is tweaking its algorithms so that your News Feed, in theory, will see you commenting and liking more content.

Facebook knows everything about you, from who your friends and family are to what you like and where you’ve been.

What does it mean for you interaction-hungry publishers on Facebook? But it doesn’t-not even close.

Tuning the algorithm for how the News Feed decides what to show has helped Facebook remain fresh for nearly a decade.

Of course you can always manually override what you see first, if you don’t want Facebook deciding that for you.

That’s about to change.

Typically, news feed stories are curated based on likes, comments and shares, but following feedback Facebook has now chose to focus on “signals” from users rather than engagement.

Starting today, the social networking company said it’s looking at two new signals: the probability you’ll want to see a story at the top of the News Feed and the likelihood you’ll take some sort of action on it. Maybe you’ve seen some of these survey questions at the top of your feed. In this case, Facebook says most pages won’t notice much of a difference, but you might see a decline if the rate at which your stories are clicked doesn’t match how much people report wanting to see your story near the top. However, that traditional approach is now being changed by Facebook; thanks to the insights the company has gained from new qualitative surveys in which users ranked each feed story by giving them one to five stars. Those updates might be pushed down your feed, making you less likely to see them or click on them.

Zhang and Chen specifically called out clickbait, saying “Pages should avoid encouraging people to take an action (such as encouraging lots of clicks), because this will likely only cause temporary spikes in metrics that might then be rebalanced by feed’s ranking over time”.