Facebook News Feed Favors Friends & Pages Vs. Memes

Facebook lets us do much more than just stay in touch with friends. There are countless features that can be used for networking, Pages on the other hand let users connect with their favorite personalities, brands, companies etc. Updates from friends and Pages are shown in the user’s News Feed, a one stop destination for the user’s entire presence on the world’s largest social network. Facebook announced today that it has tweaked News Feed so that now it shows more text status updates from friends and less from Pages.

It was determined through testing that people who see more text status updates on Facebook are more likely to write status updates themselves. Facebook says that its initial test showed on average 9 million additional status updates were written daily when users were shown more text status updates from friends.

Testing showed that this behavior did not apply to status updates from Pages, which is why the latest update to News Feed treats them as an entirely different category as opposed to text status updates from friends. Facebook says that this tweak will allow it to show people more content that they want to see, from the people they want to see it from. It cautions Page admins that they can now expect to see a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, social media, social networks