“We’re making a major change to how we build Facebook.”
Facebook has announced that it will roll out “major” changes to users’ news feeds that will prioritise interactions with friends and family over public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – in the coming months.
In a post on Thursday, Facebook announced its intention to prioritise posts “that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people” by predicting which posts you might want to interact with your friends about and showing these posts higher in your news feed.
Specifically, Facebook says that prioritised posts will be posts that “inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to”, for example, a post from a friend seeking advice, asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion.
By prioritising posts from friends and family and because news feed space is limited, Facebook will be showing less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses, although pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.
Live videos, for example, which on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos, will appear higher in news feeds, as will videos from creators and posts from celebrities that prompt discussion among their followers.
In a post on his own Facebook page, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the impending changes to news feeds are based on feedback from the Facebook community and that, while changes were made in a new direction in 2017, “major” changes will be rolled out in the coming months.
“Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” Zuckerburg wrote.
“But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.
“At its best, Facebook has always been about personal connections. By focusing on bringing people closer together — whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world — we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent.”
You can read about the changes to Facebook news feeds in more detail here.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Conor Sketches | Tiger Woods loves Ger Loughnane and cosplaying as Charles LeClerc
