Facebook makes News Feed more relevant

That feedback, along with an individual’s history of clicking, commenting and sharing, among other factors, will be used to create a new ranking signal that helps Facebook predict how informative a specific user will find a story.

In an official release, Vibhi Kant, Product Manager, Facebook, Akos Lada, Data Scientist, Facebook, and Jie Xu, Research Scientist, Facebook, said, “To better understand how we can show people the most informative stories to them, we talk to people and ask them how we can improve what they see when they check Facebook”.

In an effort to be more informative, Facebook is once again updating its news feed algorithm. “Pages should continue to post stories that are relevant to their audiences, and that their readers might find informative”. This will give publishers a chance to get on top of the News Feed of users after Facebook preferred friends over publishers in its June update. The ideal mixture appears to be formed out of news articles covering current events, status updates from family and friends and the latest celebrity gossip.

“Facebook lives and dies by the News Feed – if it’s giving people what they want, then people stay longer, see more ads and make more money for Facebook”.

When combined, it allows Facebook to filter out informative stories while relying on user interests and preferences. “What makes someone feel informed about the world is personal”, states Facebook in a blog post.

For those not in the know, the Feed Quality Program consists of tens of thousands of surveys that are being crowd-sourced daily.

The company also has certain requirements for posts to qualify as “personally informative” for a user.

The move comes just a week after the social network introduced another big change to the Feed, one that aims to save users from clickbait. Facebook claims that this bespoke system will serve up different stories catered to your interests over time.

How will this change impact Facebook publishers and marketers?

Today’s update is neither good news nor bad news for publishers – at the end of its note, Facebook said referral traffic to pages would increase or decrease only slightly on a case-by-case basis.