Earlier last week reports had emerged that Facebook replaced its famous EdgeRank system with a better algorithm to surface the most important news on your News Feed. The social networking giant has now confirmed that it has indeed updated its News Feed algorithm to showcase “high quality” content from pages that you’ve liked.
Facebook has updated its algorithm to be able to bring the right kind of content at the right time to News Feeds of users who will appreciate it. Facebook had been facing some flak for being unable to surface content from pages that were liked by users for a while now. This tweak in its algorithm should solve this issue.
In a blog post announcing the new algorithm, Facebook's Varun Kacholia wrote, “Our goal is to show the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them. As part of that we want to make sure that the best quality content is being produced, surfaced and shared. Our latest update to the News Feed ranking algorithm helps ensure that the organic content people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.”
Kacholia writes that in order to figure out what high quality content meant, Facebook surveyed thousands of users to understand what they wanted to see. Questions asked to users includes “Is this timely and relevant content”, “Is this content from a source you would trust,” “Would you share it with friends and recommend it to others.” “Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)”.
Most interestingly, Facebook bunched memes with low quality posts while asking users about high quality posts. The social networking website will be punishing posts by pages that are actually memes since it considers them to be low quality. Facebook will be taking into consideration issues like whether users have hidden posts from the page recently or frequently. This will qualify those posts as low quality ones. Important factors also include how complete the Facebook profile of the page is and whether or not the fan base for a particular page overlaps with other known high quality pages.
The algorithm is supposed to be quite intuitive and will keep learning to classify high quality posts and pages as and when users keep interacting with them and sending in more feedback. Kacholia writes that this new algorithm had been tested with a small group of audiences first and it worked well as it not only drove up the interaction on these pages but also saw users hiding lesser stories throughout.
For pages that are seeing good engagement already, this new algorithm will assure that your content is seen by people who matter and more fans of your pages as the quality of your posts improve. Thanks to better insights rolled out by Facebook recently. Page admins should be able to figure out the kind of posts that drive up engagement as well as targeting and timing. Looks like Facebook has finally got its act together as far as content is concerned
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