Starting next year, the News Feed is going to look a little different, the company announces, offering people a heads-up

Nov 15, 2014 09:17 GMT  ·  By

Facebook has made some new changes to its News Feed to display fewer promotional page posts.

The company says that one of the main reasons people come to Facebook is to see what’s happening in their News Feeds. As the social network seeks to give users what they're interested in, which makes sense, considering that if people no longer like Facebook, they’ll stop using it, the company looks at user feedback.

“As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their News Feeds. People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they cared about, and less promotional content,” Facebook notes.

Digging through its own data to better understand the feedback, Facebook discovered that a lot of the content people see as “too promotional” is posts from Pages they like, rather than actual ads.

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense and it sounds more like an excuse to keep displaying their own ads, but Facebook manages to come up with an explanation. They say that News Feed has controls for the number of ads a person sees and for the quality of those ads, which is based on engagement levels, hiding ads and so on, but these haven’t been as closely monitored for promotional Page posts.

For this purpose, they’re bringing new volume and content controls for promotional posts, so people could see more of what they want from these Pages.

Through their surveys, Facebook has discovered that there are various things that make organic posts feel too promotional, such as posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app.

Another thing that bugs people is when posts push them to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context or those that reuse the exact same content from ads.

2015 with a new News Feed

As a result, starting January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their News Feed. This area is already a competitive place, especially since the network engagement grows, both from users posting content and from Pages.

“All of this means that Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time,” Facebook points out.

This doesn’t mean that the number of ads you see in your News Feed will decrease, however. The point of all this is to increase the relevance and quality of the overall stories, including Page posts, that people see when they log into Facebook.

Changes to Facebook's News Feed (4 Images)

Facebook's News Feed is going to go through some changes
This type of posts will get the axeThis one too
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