Facebook fine-tunes News Feed formula
Social media giant to give ‘informative’ posts more weight
Facebook is altering the formula that determines what its 1.71 billion users see when they log into the social network to give priority to posts that make them feel informed, the tech giant said Thursday.
It’s the latest in a series of changes to guide Facebook users to compelling content — be it status updates from friends, news articles about current events or the latest about their favorite celebrity — that sucks them in longer and keeps them coming back.
Facebook says its goal is to put the updates that are most important to each individual user highest in their News Feed, yet Facebook users often complain that News Feed, coming up on its 10th anniversary, doesn’t know what they want to see there.
News Feed is critical to Facebook’s success. The more time users spend in it, the more ads Facebook can show them.
Last week, Facebook said it was cracking down on “clickbait,” articles with misleading or vague headlines that lure people into clicking on them. In June, Facebook said it would give preference to posts from friends and family over content from public figures and publishers.
To define what is “informative” to people, Facebook had users in its “Feed Quality Program” rate posts from local news to hobbies to recipes on a scale of one to five, one being “really not informative” and five being “really informative.” The Feed Quality Program surveys the opinions of tens of thousands of people a day, Facebook said.
From there, Facebook developed a methodology — a ranking signal combined with how relevant the story might be to you personally — to predict which of the posts would most interest individual users, taking into account their relationship to the person or publisher and what they typically choose to click on, comment on or share.