Car Dealer Reputations: Official Facebook Explanation of News Feed Algorithm Changes

Cleaning up News Feed Spam: What it Means for Businesses

Via Facebook: Earlier today Facebook announced a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don't want to see. The goal of these changes is to make sure that News Feed delivers the right content to the right people at the right time, so everyone on Facebook sees the stories that are important to them. We'd like to now explain how these improvements will impact businesses on Facebook.

First, a bit of context. Many of these spammy stories are published by Pages that deliberately try to game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would. The vast majority of publishers on Facebook are not posting feed spam, so should not be negatively impacted by these changes. If anything, businesses may see a very small increase in News Feed distribution.

Publishers who are frequently and intentionally creating feed spam will see their distribution decrease over the next few months. In particular, we're targeting three broad categories of feed spam:

Like-baiting

"Like-baiting" is when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to garner additional distribution.

People often respond to posts asking them to take an action, and this means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed. However, when we survey people and ask them to rate the quality of these stories, they report that like-baiting stories are, on average, 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares. Over time, these stories lead to a less enjoyable experience of Facebook since they drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.

The improvement we are making today better detects these stories and helps ensure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Pages. This update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, and focuses initially on Pages that frequently post explicitly asking for likes, comments and shares.

What this means to businesses: Focus on posting content that is relevant and interesting to your target audiences. It's OK to encourage discussion about your posts' content, but you should avoid asking for likes or shares to get more distribution.

Frequently circulated content

People and Pages on Facebook frequently reshare great content, but people tell us there are occasionally instances where photos or videos are uploaded to Facebook over and over again. We've found that people tend to find these instances of repeated content less relevant, and are more likely to complain about the Pages that frequently post them. We are improving News Feed to de-emphasize these Pages, and our early testing shows that this change causes people to hide 10% fewer stories from Pages overall.

What this means to businesses: Develop a publishing strategy that uses original content and is not copied from other sources.

Spammy links

Some stories in News Feed use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads. Often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads.

We've been able to better detect spammy links by measuring how frequently people on Facebook who visit a link choose to like the original post or share that post with their friends. The update we are making today reduces cases of these spammy links. In our early testing we've seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook. This is a big increase in the context of News Feed and a good sign that people are finding the remaining content in their News Feed more relevant and trustworthy.

What this means to businesses: Marketers who are linking to their own legitimate websites will not be affected by this update.