News Feed algorithm tweak: Status updates from pages moving down

Facebook announced Tuesday another change to its News Feed algorithm, this time involving status updates. Some page admins last year found that plain-text status updates (or status updates including a link) were doing well in terms of reach. However, Facebook found that engagement was lower for these types of posts.

The social network decided that since status updates from pages behave differently than photo, video and link posts, they should be treated differently. While users may see more status updates from friends, pages may see a decline in reach for these types of posts, writes Facebook’s Chris Turitzin, Product Manager, News Feed Ranking:

As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types. This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.

Many Page owners often ask what kind of content they should post. This is difficult to answer, as it depends on who your audience is and what they want to see.

The move is to prompt more pages to take advantage of Facebook’s more visual link share format, instead of posting a link within a status update (as illustrated above). Turitzin notes that the new and improved link share format (which pulls a large image from the website linked to) has led to enhanced engagement and provide a more visual experience for fans.

He emphasized that there’s no magic bullet format that page admins should be using:

In general, we recommend that you use the story type that best fits the message that you want to tell – whether that’s a status, photo, link or video.

Readers: What do you think of this decision?

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Facebook tweaks News Feed algorithm to deliver more relevant ads

Facebook is constantly making changes to its News Feed algorithm. The most recent major changes came with Story Bumping and Last Actor, but the site announced Friday that it is altering the algorithm to help advertisers deliver more relevant ads to users.

Hong Ge, Facebook’s Engineering Manager for News Feed ads, said in a blog post that these latest changes come after receiving feedback both from brands and from users regarding what’s best in News Feed.

Ge described the changes that are coming to the News Feed algorithm:

When deciding which ad to show to which groups of people, we are placing more emphasis on feedback we receive from people about ads, including how often people report or hide an ad.

That means people should see ads that are increasingly relevant to them, and fewer ads that they might not be interested in.

For marketers, this means we are showing ads to the people who might want to see them the most. For example, if someone always hides ads for electronics, we will reduce the number of those types of ads that we show to them.

This means that some marketers may see some variation in the distribution of their ads in the coming weeks. Our goal is to make sure we deliver the most relevant ads, which should mean the right people are seeing a specific ad campaign. This is ultimately better for marketers, because it means their messages are reaching the people most interested in what they have to offer.

Readers: Do you feel that the ads you see in News Feed are relevant enough?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Facebook test makes comments on page posts more like web plugin, including in-line replies and ranking algorithm

Facebook has given us an update on its latest test for page post comments: in addition to a new option to reply to specific comments, the entire thread will be sorted by an algorithm to put the most engaging comments higher.

These changes make comments on page posts more similar to Facebook’s comments plugin for third-party sites, which have had threaded conversations and a ranking algorithm since March 2011. It makes sense to bring these features to page posts where there can be dozens or even thousands of comments, and users cannot tag and mention other fans they aren’t friends with. If Facebook rolls out these changes more widely, pages may see increased engagement on posts since high-quality comments will be surfaced up top and users will be notified when someone replies to their comment.

This current test sorts comments by Likes and replies, but it is not personalized for each user as it is with the comments plugin. With the plugin, Facebook will show comments from a user’s friend or friend of friend first. This would be useful for page comments as well, so we’ll see if it makes it into another iteration of the test.

Facebook says this new format is being tested for page posts only, not on users’ personal posts.

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