“To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often,” said Winston Churchill. And it seems that Facebook is doing the same. With constant updates in the users’ News Feed, the social networking giant is striving hard to improve the user experience. In short, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg wants the users to see or watch what they want – a personalized digital newspaper.
According to the Facebook’s blog post, it has started updating its news feed algorithm to maintain a perfect balance between the contents updated by friends and other pages. The content displayed will be dependent users’ interest. The mixture of content from friends, publishers, businesses, public figures and community organizations will be updated on the users’ news feed. This will give them news from each and everyone out there but only of person’s interest.
While Facebook has been making changes at frequent intervals, their last few updates did not go down too well with many users, especially brands and publishers who had pages. Over time, the updates made to the News Feed algorithm have reduced their engagement levels.
Three Major Facebook News Feed Updates
According to the announcement, Facebook will be rolling our three major updates in the news feed of every user profile.
For People with less friends: Not every user has hundreds or thousands of friends. So how does the person get more stories from friends? It’s not possible to get from mutual friends as well. To improve the content availability, Facebook will be now allowing the news feed to display more content from one source which was changed in the previous update.
All Updates from Friends Visible: You will never miss an update from your friend. Be it an image, video or just a few lines, these posts will be higher on your news feed. The same goes with the pages you are following or have liked before.
Just an Example:
Have a look at the image which is right on the top of my Facebook News Feed. Although, the post was one hour ago it was in the top 3 when I logged in my Facebook account. This is what Facebook wants to show the users so that they will never miss the updates from their friends.
Your Friend Likes & Comments: The third update is all about what your friends like or comment on other posts. Just for an instance, if your friend likes a post from the cricket news, it appears on your news feed as well. Now this is what most of the users don’t want to see according to Facebook analysis. Just for an instance, have a look at this image
At present, you can see such updates in your account, but right after this Facebook update, you might not find such updates in your News Feed.
Now this might be a huge loss for the businesses or pages that are liked by your friends and you can’t see them. The potential reach for such likes or comments on the pages will be reduced.
Facebook’s News Feed Then and Now
When update bought changes to their News Feed algorithm, it was exactly the opposite of what has been done today. It stopped a single source to display the different stories in the news feed. But now it seems to change it again because users, at times, don’t have enough stories to read. That turned out to be a failure for the social networking giant and it’s now back to what it provided in the past to the users.
Last year Facebook came up with auto-play video option in its news feed update. But it didn’t work well either as most of the users hated that video feature in that update. It would be interesting to see that how the Facebook users react to this algorithmic change in their News feeds.
Did you see any such changes in your news feed?
