In an effort to be more informative, Facebook is once again updating its news feed algorithm. This latest change will see Facebook boosting the visibility of stories it thinks you will find “really informative.”
The key words here are personalization and prediction. Facebook’s new ranking signal aims to deliver stories to your news feed by predicting which stories you will find the most informative to you personally.
How will this change impact Facebook publishers and marketers? Facebook said some pages could see minor losses or gains in referral traffic.
How Does Facebook Define ‘Informative’?
Well, it’s personal and always changing, according to Facebook’s blog post.
“Something that one person finds informative may be different from what another person finds informative,” according to Facebook. “This could be a news article on a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news, a review of an upcoming movie, a recipe or anything that informs you.”
There are two parts to the Facebook’s “informative” signal.
1. Feedback
Facebook spoke a bit about its Feed Quality Program, in which it has people rank stories that appear in their feed on a scale of 1 (“really not informative”) to 5 (“really informative”).
What Facebook discovered was that the things people rated as “really informative” were “related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions and if they contain news about the world around them.”
2. Relevance
Because what is considered informative varies so much from person to person, Facebook will try to predict how relevant its users will think a story is.
Facebook will base its predictions based on personalization factors, such as a user’s relationship to the person or page, and what users click on, comment, and share.
This latest adjustment from Facebook follows recent tweaks to favor posts by friends and family and reduce the amount of clickbait users see in their news feeds.
What do you think of this latest change to Facebook’s news feed?
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