Facebook is updating its algorithm to show a personal feed of content to its users. In a bid to make the news feed more relevant to people, you will now see more posts from friends and family but lesser from pages with lower ranking and engagement.
Adam Mosseri, VP, Product Management, News Feed of Facebook, stated “Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family. That is still the driving principle of News Feed today. 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 if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down. To help make sure you don’t miss the friends and family posts you are likely to care about, we put those posts toward the top of your News Feed. We learn from you and adapt over time. For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, we’ll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won’t miss what she posted while you were away.”
Page owners might be thinking how this may affect their page. To address this, he further added, “Overall, 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”
Facebook recently announced human curated events to give better localised entertainment search, and the same will be rolling out to users in 10 cities in USA. Facebook also rolled out new designs, share and save extensions for the Chrome browser, with Instant articles also getting the newly designed reaction buttons. Facebook also launched Facebook for Work in India, aiming to completely replace multiple work suites by integrating various services into a familiar interface design. The recent change in algorithm falls in line with Facebook's quest to present nearly everything possible to its users. It remains to be seen how these changes impact individuals and publishers alike.