If you have a lot of annoying and boring friends on Facebook, maybe now is the time to actually find new, more exciting ones. The social networking giant has announced that it is once again tweaking the algorithm of your News Feed so that the priority will be seeing more of your friends’ posts rather than brands. While they don’t exactly say that you’ll be seeing less brands on your timeline, they do discuss what are the characteristics of “News Feed Values”.
“Friends and Family Comes First” is the basic new motto for your News Feed. But it also takes a look at who are the people you interact with the most, those people whose posts you like or comment on often, etc. The algorithm looks at the user’s preferences as well to promote posts that “inform and entertain” as those are the two goals of your News Feed. Facebook also emphasized that they do not determine what links should or shouldn’t be shared on the site, but the algorithm also looks at what content you’ll find more interesting or engaging based on its ranking system.
Facebook also reiterates that users should utilize the Unfollow, Hide, and See First options that you can use on your timeline so you can take some kind of control over your News Feed. So if you have friends and family whose posts you actually don’t want to see on your feed, then by all means, use those buttons freely instead of just complaining that so and so annoys you with their countless selfies or offensive posts.
So where does this leave brand pages on Facebook? What if you actually prefer to see them as well as various publishers over those of posts from “real people? Some have suggested that Facebook should just get rid of the algorithm altogether and just let your News Feed become a sequential flow of posts. But with a lot of social media services going algorithm rather than just chronological, then this is probably unlikely.
VIA: SlashGear
