Facebook has announced that it is updating the way the news feed works, in an attempt to balance content from your friends and pages you have liked or subscribed to.
The company has said that the changes arose from feedback given by users. Users have been asked to rate their personal News Feeds to give Facebook an insight into what changes may be needed going forward. Facebook was quick to note that these changes will be made in the background, without requiring a physical app update.
In their new statement, Facebook has stated that:
The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organisations you are connected to. This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving News Feed to get this balance right.
The first big change will come from improving the quality of content for those who don’t or may not have a lot of content to see normally. Let’s be honest here, not everyone has hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook. The second big change comes from the company relaxing the rule which prevented multiple stories from the same source appearing. This has now been ‘relaxed’ which will now help deliver more content to those who would be interested.
The next change is mainly ensuring that content posted by friends you care about will and shall remain higher in your news feed whilst ensuring a better balance of content from pages you’ve subscribed to (i.e posts from companies or brands, etc).
The last change mainly comes from Facebook, with it de-prioritising updates such as your friends liking or commenting on a post. These kinds of posts will now appear lower in the News Feed or may not appear at all, depending on how many friends you have or how active they are.
As stated, there is no official app update for Facebook and these changes will be applied behind the scenes, so you should see them soon!
