Facebook Wants To Show More From Your Friends

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

Facebook has announced in a post that it is changing their algorithm slightly on what you see appearing in your news feed to be more in favour of content from your close friends as opposed to pages and brands.

Facebook says it is making three changes to the news feed algorithm, the first one won’t let people get to the “end” of their news feed as easily because they will now be willing to show more content from the same publisher. Previously you wouldn’t be likely to see two posts from the same page and eventually you would hit the “end” of your news feed where content appears that you saw on your last Facebook visit and as we all know by now, Facebook wants you to spend as much time as possible on their website.

The other two changes are directed at allowing you to see more content from your friends as opposed to seeing content from brands and publishers. Content posted from friends will now rank higher up in the feed than posts from pages, also if a friend interacts with a post from a brand or publisher page it will be less likely to show up on your news feed unless their decide to share it on their account.

These updates will no doubt slightly concern publishers and brands, particularly smaller businesses like SMEs who are trying to extend their reach via social networking. Users will be less likely to kick up a fuss about a change like this because it will mean seeing more content from friends, however how brands will feel about it is yet to be seen.

The “big news” yesterday was all about ‘Mobilegeddon’ and it was Google’s rebalancing of search results to demote websites which have bad mobile experiences. While search results are still important to publishers, traffic from Facebook has steadily been rising and has become a big deal.

It is hard to tell what is going to happen with regards to publishers until the algorithm starts to swing into effect. It could have significant impact however it may not have an impact on traffic from Facebook at all. Last August Facebook tweaked their algorithm to reduce “clickbait” headlines and it didn’t case the world of web publishing to collapse.

Time will soon tell what the impact is going to be, if the algorithm changes do start causing traffic problems for websites trying to get articles, content and products out there you can almost bet that Facebook is going to start hearing about it.

About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here. Or you can drop Mark an email at, daltomark@me.com