-Marco D'Souza
Just when you were getting used to the last change that Facebook made to your timeline, they went ahead and made another ‘tweak’; this time once more to the way in which stories populate your hallowed News Feed.
In their quest to find the right mix of stories to display from your friends, the brands and people you follow, they claim that this new adjustment to the News Feed algorithm will give you more information about what is happening to “the friends you care about.” A Golden Fleece no doubt, but now when you open Facebook and notice a difference in the loadout of stories that appear, you’ll know why.
"The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you," said a blog post by Facebook's Max Eulenstein and Lauren Scissors. One of the key changes aims "to ensure that content posted directly by the friends you care about, such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss it," the blog stated. This is especially relevant to users having a multitude of friends where the pet peeve was missing out many on key updates from people they care about.
In reality, this change may result in users seeing a lesser number of updates from stories that friends have liked or commented on, and a greater number of stories directly from friends and pages that users have themselves liked. So a higher priority to the first degree of liking and commenting, compared to a second degree or third degree of association, if that makes sense.
Also up until now Facebook’s News Feed had a rule that prevented people from seeing multiple posts from the same source. That rule has apparently been relaxed, where users--especially those with a lesser number of online friends-- are more likely to see multiple posts from their favourite friends in their timeline. This change is aimed at "improving the experience for people who don't have a lot of content available to see," Eulenstein and Scissors wrote.
However with these changes come a possible and potentially serious downside where, in some cases, post reach and referral traffic could possibly decline. While this will be a concern to brands hoping to reach out to more fans online, Facebook states that continuing to follow their page post best practices should ensure that relevant and meaningful content reaches audiences’ timeline.
