Facebook News Feed tweak downgrades brands’ text-only posts
Facebook has made another update to its News Feed algorithm which will downgrade text-only posts from brand pages after testing showed users are more likely to engage with posts that contain links and images.
In a blog post, Facebook news feed ranking product manager Chris Turitzin said while users are more likely to write more status updates themselves when they see text-only updates from their friends, the same effect was not true for text-only status updates from Pages.
As a result, Facebook will now rank text status updates from pages in a lower category to text status updates from friends – meaning Page owners will see a decrease in the amount of visibility and engagement they achieve from these types of posts.
Turitzin adds: “We are learning that posts for Pages behave differently to post from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so we do a better job of differentiating between the two types.”
The blog post advises one of the best ways for brands to achieve engagement with posts is to use Facebook’s link-share option, which embeds a picture as well as a click-through to a web page as this provides a “more visual and compelling experience”.
This update is the latest in a slew of tweaks to make the News Feed more visual and to prevent the spate of clickbait memes taking over users’ daily experience of the site.
Last month Facebook changed the News Feed algorithms to display more links from media organisations, an update designed to make the social network more relevant to current events like its rival Twitter, which has often been cited as the platform for breaking and sharing big news stories. Last week it also aped Twitter by launching its version of a “Trending Topics” section.
In December Facebook started testing video ads that play automatically as users scroll through their News Feeds.