Facebook’s making sweeping changes to the way News Feed works in order to make sure there’s more posts from friends and less from Pages. The company says its goal is to help people have more meaningful conversations on the site rather than mindlessly scrolling through posts.
While Facebook is trying to present these as revolutionary modifications, it’s all part of the same agenda it’s always followed – trying to increase engagement and actual content from users. While it focused on videos before, it’s now nudging its members to talk directly to each other.
This could be a positive step forward for many, especially those who are sick of seeing an endless list of autoplaying silent videos instead of posts from actual humans. However, it’ll spell doom for publishers who will now have a tougher time getting into a person’s News Feed.
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Facebook will use signals to test which posts are worthy of the revamped News Feed. For instance, if many users react, comment or share a post, it’ll get a higher ranking. The company is also going to predict which posts will spark interactions among friends.
Facebook users can tweak their way around these changes by customizing See First in News Feed Preferences to make sure they always see posts from their preferred Pages. Not a lot of people may do that though, so Pages are probably going to see their reach and referral traffic slide down.
Mark Zuckerberg had some interesting things to say about Facebook’s new outlook in a recent post. He thinks the amount of time people spend on Facebook will decrease, but at the same time become more valuable. Only time will tell if his view of things will bear out or it’ll just be the same old Facebook.