This time it is the Facebook News Feed section which has been updated to display what the company calls more ‘high quality’ content. And something gives us the feeling that Facebook just isn’t the social network which prefers staying out of the limelight for a very long time as Zuckerberg’s crew recently decided to extend Internet access to around 5 million people (basically the rest of the world’s population which isn’t exposed to the web currently).
Moving on, it appears that the Menlo Park folks have tweaked the News Feed algorithm to highlight content that users would like to see the most. So who decides what’s important and what isn’t? Well, a lot of people were introduced to a survey to help the company develop such a ranking method. They were asked questions concerning the content’s accuracy, sense of timing, source’s reliability and so on.
All this led to the entry of a new system which considers a thousand factors before pegging some content as high quality. The social network will now not only give priority to feeds which are most liked or shared by many friends, but it will also keep track of how many posts from a Page are hidden and similar actions. If we were to believe the company’s statement, this had a positive outcome when tested on a smaller group, with users interacting more through likes and comments.
The difference that most Pages make on the News Feed after the update will however be negligible, except if they are witnessing a good amount of interactions. It should take a few weeks before the results begin to surface for everyone.