Facebook has made an important change to its algorithm for News Feed to ensure more prominence to “high quality content”. According to the social networking giant, the latest update to the News Feed ranking system ensures the organic content that people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.
The new algorithm is based on a range of factors including timeliness, relevancy, trustable source, sharing with friends and interest. The update, however, goes harsh on low quality posts or memes, which have flooded the social networking website. Facebook says the update is based on feedback of thousands of users.
“We used the results of this survey to build a new machine learning system to detect content defined as high quality. The system uses over a thousand different factors, such as how frequently content from a certain Page is reported as low quality (e.g., hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and whether the fan base for a particular Page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality Pages. Coming up with an algorithm to detect this is complex, and we will continue to refine it as we get more feedback,” says Facebook in a post.
Facebook said its trial of new algorithm with select users showed greater engagement with high quality content and interesting stories from the Pages they are connected to.
With the latest update, Pages on Facebook that are “seeing good engagement on their posts could see further increases in reach. The bottom line is that your Page strategy should still stay the same: produce high quality content and optimize for engagement and reach,” adds Facebook.
Facebook advises Pages owners to make their posts timely and relevant and build credibility and trust with audience. You can learn more about the new algorithm here.
Facebook recently overhauled the News Feed with a special emphasis on minimalism in design, and greater visibility for shared media – photos and videos. Last round of update to News Feed algorithm was aimed at surfacing the popular stories for longer on the feed. The update also ensured unread posts are resurfaced for better reach.