Facebook has changed a lot over the years, but one feature that has mostly stood the test of time is the News Feed, the first thing you see when you open up the website or app which houses all of the posts and suggested stories that you may or may not spend more than an hour scrolling through. Today Facebook announced that they would be switching things up with the News Feed just a little bit in an attempt to deliver people the stories and posts they are more likely to want to see. Facebook’s motivation is getting people to engage more with the content in their feeds.
Getting users to engage more doesn’t just happen overnight of course. To get people to interact more, Facebook has done some pretty extensive research on the subject which includes making daily requests to over a thousand users to rate their experience with the news feeds. That’s in addition to having people rate specific posts that Facebook asks about so they can learn how much users are wanting to see certain types of posts that show up in the feed. What it came down to is that Facebook saw more positive feedback from users when those users were presented with two particular factors on posts that show up at the top of the feed – posts that ask users how they rate what they’re seeing, and posts that users are more likely to interact with.
Using this information, Facebook is going to attempt to present people with a higher quality News Feed experience by showing posts that they think users will engage with more by clicking on them, liking them, and commenting on them, and by attempting to show posts which they think users will want to see. For the most part, Facebook states that most feeds won’t see much of an impact from the changes meaning they won’t notice a huge amount of difference in the types of posts that appear, as the impact partially depends on the “posting activity” of that user. To put everything in basic terms, Facebook wants more engagement with posts, and they’retweaking the feeds to show posts that they hope users will like more so they’re more likely to click, like, or comment.