Breaking News! Facebook News Feed Update Favors High Quality Content
Dig through your News Feed and you’ll usually find your fair share of baby pictures, puppy videos, status updates, and interesting news stories. On Monday, Facebook announced a new tweak to the News Feed that will have you seeing more high-quality content and news topics than ever before.
Why the Change?
According to a recent internal survey, Facebook found that “average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170% – almost tripled – in the last year. Today’s update to News Feed ranking recognizes that people want to see more relevant news and what their friends are saying back it.”
What’s more, average users choose to click on links to high quality content over the latest memes hosted on other places other than Facebook.
What Does the Update Look Like?
As a result of these algorithm changes, what users can expect to see are stories, articles, current events that spark up a conversation. This will include current events and updates from favorite sports teams and celebrities.
When Facebook users click on a single article, up to three related articles may show. If new comments are made on a post that’s already been seen, the article may bump back up to the top of the feed. Facebook’s goal is to deliver quality content to complement the interests of the specific user and further enhance user experience.
What This Means for Businesses
Facebook doesn’t exactly go into great detail about the types of content that it’ll be avoiding altogether or that all low-quality posts will be disappearing from the site entirely. They’ll just be “less prominent” than the more high-quality content that garner more activity and feedback from comments.
What businesses should focus on then is this: keep creating that relevant, quality content. Focus on content that is made to be read, shared and discussed. This will not only help increase engagement on news-centric social media platforms such as Twitter, Google+, and now Facebook, but will additionally help drive traffic to a business’s website. In August, Facebook announced a similar algorithm update to encourage businesses to post less-junky posts and better targeted updates. This is most likely a continuation of that same notion that a non-strategic, low-quality post will not be pushed out to clutter the News Feed. Take a look at these helpful content marketing tips to get some content ideas churning.
Facebook is trying to prove to the world that they can be a strong media partner. While the news-generating Twitter still has an edge over Facebook as a news platform, this might be a clue into how social media will evolve in the next few years. Stay tuned.
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