14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has become perhaps even spammier than your email Inbox, which is why the social network is trying to make sure that you get as few annoying messages as possible.
“Today we are announcing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would. Our update targets three broad categories of this type of feed spam behavior,” reads an announcement made by Facebook.
There are quite a few behaviors that are on Facebook’s black list. “Like-baiting” is the name Facebook has put on all those posts that explicitly ask you to like, comment or share posts in order to get additional distribution beyond normal reach.
“People often respond to posts asking them to take an action, and this means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed. However, when we survey people and ask them to rate the quality of these stories, they report that like-baiting stories are, on average, 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares,” Facebook writes, mentioning that such posts aren’t that enjoyable to users.
Facebook’s new News Feed changes will detect these stories and make sure they’re not prominently displayed. The update should not impact Pages that are simply trying to encourage discussion among fans.
Frequently circulated content will also get weeded out. This means that if all your friends will share a certain video, you won’t see it repeated a dozen times.
Spammy links are also on Facebook’s bad side. “Some stories in News Feed use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads. For instance, often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads.”
This should help increase the number of clicks on actual Facebook content trusted by users.
Facebook publishers don’t regularly engage in behavior that will annoy users too much, so the vast majority should not be affected by the new changes in the News Feed. Those who intentionally create feed spam will be hit hard, however.