Facebook is taking a page out of Google’s book by making posters do more to get their posts show up higher on user’s news feeds.
The social media platform announced today that it was updating the algorithm for rankings posts on its News Feed feature. The change will now give preference to “higher quality content” and display it higher up in the feed. By ‘higher quality content,” Facebook means posts that come from a credible source, are more likely to be shared or commented on and contain genuinely interesting content. The algorithm was adjusted to score posts based on answers to the following questions:
- Is this timely and relevant content?
- Is this content from a source you would trust?
- Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
- Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)
- Would you call this a low quality post or meme?
- Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?
By doing this, Facebook is incentivizing companies with business pages on the platform to really work on making their posts interesting and shareable. It isn’t enough to just send out a post as an update, the content has to be engaging, either through its headline or accompanying graphic.
Here are the tips on how to do that, from Facebook:
– Make your posts timely and relevant
– Build credibility and trust with your audience
– Ask yourself, “Would people share this with their friends or recommend it to others?”
– Think about, “Would my audience want to see this in their News Feeds?”
Doing this is in your own interest according to Facebook. The company says that testing results for the algorithm showed far more engagement and increase in interactions (shares, likes, comments etc.)
