Facebook algorithm changes up your News Feed, again

Facebook users can once again expect to see a change to their News Feeds. The social media company is tweaking its algorithm to sift through and weed out posts you might not be as interested in at the top of your feed.

“News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story,” Facebook stated in a blog post. “We will rank stories higher in feed which we think people might take action on, and which people might want to see near the top of their News Feed.”

The social media network said it gathered user feedback from surveys before deciding on the change.

“We ask over a thousand people to rate their experience every day and tell us how we can improve the content they see when they check Facebook — we call this our Feed Quality Panel. We also survey tens of thousands of people around the world each day to learn more about how well we’re ranking each person’s feed,” the blog post said.

Those who manage public Facebook Pages might be curious how these changes will affect traffic to their content. Facebook asserted that this update will not impact the “reach or referral traffic meaningfully for the majority of Pages.”

“The impact of these changes on a story’s distribution will vary depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity,” Facebook said. “Pages might see some declines in referral traffic if the rate at which their stories are clicked on does not match how much people report wanting to see those stories near the top of their News Feed. This update helps rebalance those two factors, so people are seeing relevant stories to them.”

The site added that Page administrators should avoid actions like encouraging lots of clicks, for instance, because that will cause “temporary spikes in metrics that might then be rebalanced by feed’s ranking over time.”