Facebook is changing its news feed algorithm to make it more inclined towards the posts from friends. Facebook news feed is the place holder where all the content posted by your friends, pages and advertised content appears. Facebook has tweaked its news feed so as less of news stories and such content appear. Posts, Status updates and images would now have preference on your wall.
Facebook’s Product Manager Max Eulenstein and User Experience Researcher Lauren Scissors updated in a post on Facebook media room. The post goes on to explain that the prime function of Facebook news feed is to show content which is important to a user. Your friends, businesses, pages and advertisers fight for space on the news feed. It is always a mix of content which is displayed. The new feature update to the news feed aims to make the balance of the content right.
Facebook has done three important changes to be implemented through this update:
- If a source or friend has posted same comment multiple times Facebook would suppress the multiple posts and would show you that post once. For People who have recently joined Facebook and have few friends and few posts to see on News Feed this restriction has been relaxed. They can now see multiple posts as well.
- Facebook has received feedback from the users. The Users want to have more posts from their network about status updates, Photos shared and their Check-Ins. These posts are sometime missed in too many posts about stories, news articles, etc. The new change will give more importance to the user generated content.
- Users complained a lot about the stories on which their friends have commented on some other image or post appearing in their News Feed. Now such stories would be ranked lower in a user’s News feed.
This change would be disadvantageous for certain businesses such as Media houses. They would want more and more people to read their story. Now the content which was forced fed to the users would be ranked lower and hence may skip the attention of users. These changes would result in a better News Feed which would be tuned more to user experience.
