Facebook has become an integral part of our lives. We check our News Feed on Facebook multiple times in a day just like we check our email accounts. But over the past few years, as we have kept on liking more and more pages, our news feed has become more or less like spam feed.
We see a lot of unwanted irrelevant content either shared by our Facebook friends or from the pages we have subscribed to. Facebook has always been updating its News Feed algorithm under its Feed Quality Program to weed out such spam and click bait-y links, and this latest development in Facebook News Room looks very promising.
Facebook Will Rank Quality Posts Higher
Under this new update, Facebook will consider a variety of actions that people do on their Facebook News Feed.
It was earlier believed that the content with more likes, comments, and shares is of high quality. But the latest findings show that some posts may not have a huge number of likes, comments, and share but are still important to the users. The new update will measure the importance of such posts and rank them higher than before.
“For example, we’ve found that there are stories people don’t like or comment on that they still want to see, such as articles about a serious current event, or sad news from a friend,” mentioned Facebook in a blog post.
Time Spent Viewing The Content Will Determine Its News Feed Rank
Facebook will give due weightage to the time spent by the people going through a piece of content after they click on it in the News Feed. The new algorithm update will also predict how long you will take looking at an article in the mobile browser on Facebook.
In short, this update intelligently rank quality content (based on its reading time with a few exceptions) that you might want to go through higher in your News Feed.
Unlike Google Search, Facebook will not consider ‘page loading time’ while ranking your content in its News Feed. But they might consider it in near future.
Wide Variety Of Content From Different Publishers
You might have noticed that your News Feed is sometimes full of content from the same publisher. This can be really annoying at times since we have liked hundreds of pages of different publishers, but can only see posts from a select few in our News Feed.
The new update will show you different stories from a wide range of publishers, thus making your News Feed more interesting.
If you are a publisher and have a Facebook page, then please be advised that you might see a small change in your Facebook referral traffic due to this update. We strongly recommend you to go through Facebook’s best publishing practices and modify your Facebook promotion strategy accordingly.