With news like mobilegeddon, Facebook has been able to fly relatively under the radar with some changes that it recently made to its News Feed algorithm.
Despite this, some are now labeling Facebook's new changes "Contentgeddon." These changes essentially target the relevance of certain posts by publishers and content providers, basically meaning that posts from these companies likely won't be seen by as many people.
"The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to," said Facebook in a blog post.
While these changes might not be the best for publishers, however, Facebook is really not making them for the publishers; it's making them for the users of Facebook. Spam on Facebook is an issue, and users spend far too much time scrolling through content in order to get to something that interests them.
For this reason, users will likely see far more posts that interest them on their news feeds and far fewer posts that are not of any interest to them. This is certainly a good thing for users.
There are three main changes that will take place on the News Feed. The first is that users might now see a post more than once, but only if they don't have much content to see on the News Feed. The second change aims to avoid users not seeing important updates from their friends and family. Last but not least, users will see fewer posts about their friends liking or commenting on particular content.
Publishers are becoming accustomed to not really having much of a choice when it comes to dealing with Facebook, and Facebook has certainly not been scared to make changes to its News Feed algorithm in the past. The company did, however, try to soften the blow to publishers by mentioning that traffic to publisher content has doubled in the past 18 months.
Despite this, Facebook has consistently said that it does not make the decisions about what ends up in the News Feed, but rather that users decide through their feedback and through their engagement with certain posts.
"The impact of these changes on your page's distribution will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity," said Facebook in a statement. "In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline. Overall, pages should continue to post things that people find meaningful and consider these best practices for driving referral traffic."
