Facebook’s news feed algorithm has gone through many changes over the years. The news feed decides the content that each user sees on their feed, aiming to show them the posts they find most relevant and engaging. Lately, Facebook has made some controversial changes to what gets prioritized in the news feed.
How does the Facebook news feed work?
The Facebook news feed uses machine learning algorithms to rank and select stories to show each user out of the thousands of posts from their network. The goal is to show each user the content most relevant to them by analyzing factors like:
- How often the user interacts with certain friends, pages, or groups
- The type of content they tend to engage with the most (photos, videos, links, status updates, etc)
- How old or recent the post is
- Keywords in the post text
- How long other users engaged with the post
- The number of likes, comments, and reshares the post receives
By examining these signals and patterns across a user’s feed, the algorithm predicts which new stories will be of interest to the user and shows higher ranked stories towards the top of the news feed. This ranking can change dynamically based on engagement as well.
How has the news feed changed over time?
When Facebook News Feed first launched in 2006, it was a purely reverse chronological feed of recent stories. But as Facebook grew, this became overwhelming. In 2009, Facebook made the first big change to use an algorithmic feed ranking posts based on relevance. Some other major milestones in the evolution of ranking factors include:
| Year | News Feed Update |
|---|---|
| 2013 | Started emphasizing original content from friends and de-emphasizing reshares and spam |
| 2014 | Began ranking video and image posts higher than text-based posts |
| 2016 | Ranked posts by relevance score determined by AI instead of simply engagement metrics |
| 2017 | Prioritized posts from friends and family over public content |
| 2018 | Focused on meaningful interactions and de-emphasized viral videos/memes |
How has the algorithm changed recently?
In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the algorithm would start prioritizing “meaningful social interactions” over “relevant content”, even if that caused people to spend less time on Facebook. This meant:
- Showing more posts from friends and family vs public figures and publishers
- Favoring discussion and comments over passive video watching
- Reducing viral videos and memes in favor of personally meaningful content
Facebook made additional tweaks in this direction in 2021-2022 to transform the platform into more of a social connection space than passive feed scrolling.
How will this impact businesses/creators?
These changes have major impacts on businesses, creators, and publishers who use Facebook. Some key implications include:
- Lower organic reach on Facebook posts since they often get de-prioritized vs personal posts
- Harder for viral entertaining content to spread organically
- Businesses need to encourage engagement and discussion, not just post content
- Ads and paid promotion become more important to reach Facebook audiences
- Influencers may see lower engagement on creative content
Essentially, Facebook is reducing the power of the news feed to broadcast information. Businesses have to adapt content and engagement strategies accordingly.
Why is Facebook making this shift?
Facebook executives have given a few reasons for algorithm changes to prioritize meaningful engagement:
- Improve user well-being – Reduce passive scrolling in favor of active conversations that may increase happiness.
- Reduce misinformation – Limit viral meme spread and emphasize discussions which could counter false claims.
- Regain public trust – Facebook has faced backlash for fake news, polarization, and its harms to teens. This move aims to make the platform about friends, not viral videos.
The changes align with Zuckerberg’s new vision for Facebook to be the “metaverse company” focused on social connection rather than content. Some critics argue the motivation is partly political and driven by threats of regulation.
What has been the impact?
The impact of recent changes has included:
- Individual users are seeing ~5% less political content in their feeds
- News publisher traffic from Facebook has fallen
- Time spent on Facebook has decreased industry-wide
- User engagement metrics like reactions, comments, and shares are down across the platform
So the shift is succeeding at decreasing passive feed consumption and viral spread at the cost of reduced engagement and traffic for content creators.
Conclusion
Facebook’s ongoing updates to its news feed algorithm – especially around meaningful social engagement – are transforming how users interact with the platform and businesses market themselves. While the change may hurt content reach and virality in the short term, the intentions are improved user well-being and more authentic social connection.
The news feed will likely continue evolving. Businesses must adapt their strategies to play by Facebook’s rules if they want to succeed. Rather than passive content, brands need to encourage community discussion around their posts. Only the conversations Facebook deems meaningful will now trend in the world’s largest social feed.