Facebook is updating the way your news feed works. According to Facebook, the goal of its news feed is to show people stories that are relevant and appropriate to them. They also stated that the purpose of Facebook is to connect people with their family and friends. Therefore, the social network will now be optimizing your content to place posts by friends and family over everything else on your news feed.
The move from the social media giants comes as the result of constant decline in sharing of original content at the platform. Facebook users are although sharing stuff online but they would rather share stuff from pages and publishers than produce content in terms of status updates, pictures and videos about themselves.
As of mid-2015, the sharing declined to 25%. Facebook’s recent decision to prefer updates from friends and family over pages and business is to combat this issue.
Today, there is too much information available to each individual on Facebook. The real challenge that the company faces is to organize and sort this information so that it is relevant for the individual previewing it. This is why news feed posts on Facebook are ranked, to ensure that people see content that matters (and that they care about) first on their news feed. Now, Facebook will automatically rank posts from friend and family higher than all other posts to make sure you don’t miss out on important stuff that they post.
After friends and family, Facebook will prefer posts that are meaningful, informative, and entertaining for the users. “We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching people with the stories they find most meaningful. Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful and engaging.”, said Adam Mosseri, Vice President of Product Management at Facebook, on the matter.
You can read the official news from Facebook from here.
