The world's largest social network, Facebook, will tweak its News Feed based on research done on thousands of users.
"The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to users," said software engineers, Cheng Zhang and Si Chen in a quick 'FYI' blog post entitled: "Using qualitative feedback to show relevant stories."
"The actions people take on Facebook ? liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post ? are historically some of the main factors considered to determine what to show at the top of users' News Feed. But these factors don't always tell the whole story of what is most meaningful to them."
To make these changes to the News Feed, the engineering team asked over a thousand people on the Feed Quality Panel to rate their experience every day and report how they think content placement can be improved.
Tens of thousands of other people around the world were also surveyed about how content is ranked in their feed. People were asked questions like: "How much did you want to see this story in your News Feed?" and asked to give a rating out of five.
From this research, the team was able to better understand which stories people would be interested in seeing near the top of their News Feed even if they choose not to click, like or comment on them.
"We are making an update to News Feed that combines these two signals," said Zhang and Chen. "News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story. We will rank stories higher in feed which we think people might take action on, and which people might want to see near the top of their News Feed."
Immediate impact?
The engineering team has said the effect of these changes on a story's distribution will vary depending on the composition of the user's audience and posting activity.
The team has warned Pages may see a decline in traffic, if the content is rated poorly.
"As this change takes effect, we'll be learning about what possible factors or posting strategies may lead to increases or declines in referral traffic, and we are committed to communicating with our partners about those findings."
The team will post updates on the News Feed Best Practices page, and in the News, Media and Publishing Facebook group.
Late last year, Facebook tweaked its News Feed for those who use the social network on a 2G connection. To improve users' experience with slow connections, Facebook said it will only show relevant news stories and let users compose comments while offline.
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