Facebook to tweak News Feed to bring family, friends closer

San Francisco: Facebook is making changes to its News Feed feature that will allow users to see more updates from family and friends than posts from businesses, brands and media, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

"One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us," Zuckerberg posted on Facebook late on Thursday.

The CEO said that Facebook has got a feedback from the community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media -- is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.

"We`re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I`m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions," he said.

"As we roll this out, you will see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard -- it should encourage meaningful interactions between people," Zuckerberg added.

The CEO said Facebook started making changes in this direction last year and it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all the products.

News Feed will be the first feature that will see the first changes, "where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups."

The update will also prioritise posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. Facebook will predict which posts its users might want to interact with their friends about, and show these posts higher in feed.

These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that users might want to share and react to -- whether that is a post from a friend seeking advice, a friend asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion.

The social media giant said since the space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation will be seen more and public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses, will be shown less.

The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it.