Facebook recently announced that it plans to change how its news Feed prioritizes news and update. “High quality” news stories and new comments on old status updates will get a boost, whereas meme centric posts will not.
Facebook like Google is notorious for rolling out algorithm updates and not really telling us about it. It’s no secret among digital marketing consultants and social media experts that a Facebook News Feed update would be rolled out by the social network yet again.
If you produce web content, you want people on Facebook to be able to find it, just as you want Google searchers to find it. Perhaps, not to the extent of a Google update, a Facebook News Feed update can have a major impact on a website’s ability to attract page views and customers. Facebook updates have already been detrimental to companies in the past.
Facebook says the new changes may not be on the scale of the Google Panda update, but are “a step in the direction.”
According to the Google the panda affected almost 12% of all search results. Facebook does the same type of thing with different approach, which makes sense as Facebook is not a search engine as per like Google. Facebook controls what users see in their News Feed with their own algorithm, which they call, or called, Edge Rank.
Facebook has done research and surveys to find what users want to see in their News Feed. The data collected told Facebook that they need to be better at identifying what is of value to users. They found that users are enjoying seeing articles in their timeline over random meme-like photos. So is this News Feed update Facebook’s Panda?
Facebook always wanted to keep their users in their own eco-system. That is why it prefers users to consume their content on Facebook and not to click on a link that takes the user off of Facebook and to another competing site. This is all good news for content creators who publish in-depth, relevant and useful articles each and every day.
As a Social Media Marketing agency, I’m very interested to see how this change will affect publishers of content and also it’s hard enough getting your full reach to see your posts organically. Towards the end of 2013, Facebook shows us once again that high quality content is king.
