Facebook is adjusting the algorithm that governs News Feeds to feature more quality content. It’s a technically challenging venture designed to help clean up News Feeds and keep end-users in the Facebook ecosystem.
While figuring out that Facebook users would like to see higher quality content in their News Feeds wasn’t much of a technical achievement, determining what determines quality was. To narrow down the definition, Facebook surveyed thousands of users to find out what they really want on their New Feeds.
Unlike Google, Facebook has a number of built-in feedback mechanisms that allow them to identify how users identify quality, such as whether or not they’re hiding content from particular sources. At the end of the process, Facebook engineers identified right around 1,000 factors that are used to determine quality.
So what’s it all mean for content creators? In a press release, Facebook reps took a page out of Matt Cutts’ playbook by saying that the new algo update won’t matter much because everyone should be creating quality content anyways.
For most Pages the impact should be relatively small, but Pages that are seeing good engagement on their posts could see further increases in reach. The bottom line is that your Page strategy should still stay the same: produce high quality content and optimize for engagement and reach.
Facebook will be rolling out the new algorithm over the next few weeks and plans on making adjustments as needed.
Will you be tweaking your marketing plan to include more high quality, Facebook-friendly content? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.