Facebook to show less content from publishers and businesses

Facebook is implementing a new system that changes the behaviour of users News Feeds. In the coming months, Facebook users will slowly see more posts from friends and family rather than publications or any other entity.

This new update came to light due to community feedback that public contents are crowding their News Feeds and are flooding out posts from friends and family. As such to stay true to their purpose of bringing people closer, Facebook is now shifting towards prioritizing posts from users friends and family.

While we already have a system where the social media platform pushes posts that have high engagements such as likes, comments, and shares to the top of a user’s feed, this time around posts from friends and family with high engagements will be shown first rather than public content. To do this, the platform will predict posts that users would most likely interact with and share and/or react to.

Due to this new system and the limited space in News Feeds, users will now see a reduced number of public content, including videos and other posts from publishers and businesses. As such, Pages may notice lower interactions and reach of their posts, videos, and referral traffic. If users still wish to see posts from Pages they follow though, then they are advised to toggle the “See First” option in the News Feed preferences settings, this way posts from those Pages will always appear in their news feed.

Incidentally, Page posts that generate conversation among people will also receive higher priority. Content with high exchange between the producer and their audience, say for example a Q&A live video or news on important issues, will get bumped up the News Feed more. Although, Facebook is still issuing a warning that “engagement-bait” posts are not meaningful posts and that they will continue to demote such content in News Feeds.

Although it may seem like it, Facebook is stating that they are not eliminating Page contents from News Feeds but there will surely be fewer page posts once the new system gets implemented.

source: Facebook