Facebook has rolled out a major announcement this past Wednesday, limiting the exposure that content from business pages, and public profiles for brands and celebrities get; instead focusing on showing more posts from friends and family. Frankly Facebook has been pushing towards this change for a while now because there is simply too much content on Facebook and showcasing it to everyone is just impossible. As such Facebook has a ranking algorithm, which is periodically tweaked in an effort to maintain the most relevant, and interesting News Feed. This algorithm is based on a core set of values, and for the first time ever Facebook has released what these values are, and what the News Feed will be based on moving forward:
- Friends & Family Come First
- Informative Posts Follow Second
- Entertainment Posts Come Last
What you find entertaining, and what you find informative is up to you to decide and up to you to let Facebook know by liking, following, sharing, and interacting with the type of posts you want to see more of.
Ultimately, you know what’s most meaningful to you — and that’s why we’ve developed controls so you can customize what you see. Features such as “unfollow,” “hide” and “see first” help you design your own experience — and when you use them, we take your actions as feedback to help us better understand what content is most important to you. For example, if you hide a story from someone, that signals that you’re less interested in hearing from that person in the future. As News Feed evolves, we’ll continue building easy-to-use and powerful tools to give you the most personalized experience.
Publishers and news outlets, who rely on Facebook users to click on their content and generate ad revenue, may suffer the most with the change. Furthermore many small businesses often share various business news on their Facebook pages – and often times these posts don’t get a large amount of likes and interactions – even though they get seen by many and are relied on by many. For example, let’s say that you announce on your restaurants Facebook page that you will be closed for the July 4th holiday. That’s extremely important information for people to see, however it probably won’t garnish likes from hundreds of people. What will happen to posts such as these remains to be seen.