By Chris Crum
Facebook announced a new News Feed feature on Tuesday, which will show users more updates from Pages they don’t follow.
You’ll see updates from Pages that you haven’t liked when they’re about other Pages that you have liked. For example, if you like Dwight Howard on Facebook, you might see a Bleacher Report update about him if they’ve tagged him in their post.
As Facebook notes, it already does this with updates from friends. The company tested the feature for Pages, and found that people gave this kind of content high scores in surveys.
“We look at many factors to make sure the most relevant stories appear in News Feed, including which posts are getting the most engagement (such as likes, comments, shares and clicks) across all of Facebook,” says product manager Andrew Song. “We also consider which posts are getting the most engagement from people who like both the Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.”
“For example, if many people who like Dwight Howard also like the Bleacher Report, it suggests that these two Pages are connected,” he adds. “If we see that people who like both the Bleacher Report and Dwight Howard are liking the post above, that’s an indication that it may be relevant for people who only like Dwight Howard. This means some Page posts that tag other Pages may be seen by new people.”
Facebook considers the feature a way for people to discover conversations around topics they’re interested in, not unlike the Trending feature it recently launched. It is quite different, however, as Trending appears off to the side as opposed to in the News Feed itself.
It will be interesting to see how Page owners react to the change. As you may know, Facebook recently made adjustments to its News Feed ranking algorithm that greatly hurt the visibility of many pages’ posts, while rewarding Pages that managed to be white-listed for “quality” by Facebook.
It’s interesting that Bleacher Report is the example Facebook chooses to show. This was one of 29 sites it worked with on some other Page testing, which it discussed last fall. Back then, Facebook was encouraging Pages to increase the frequency of their posting, finding that for sites like Bleacher Report, BuzzFeed, Time and the other 26, referral traffic increased significantly. Then came the algorithm update, and BuzzFeed is was one known to have flourished. When asked for the whole list of 29 sites recently, Facebook declined to share it.
Do people really want to see more content from Pages they have not actually liked and less from those that they have?
Images via Facebook
Source: WebPro News 1
Facebook Adds More Content to Your News Feed from Pages You Haven’t Liked
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