Facebook has decided to tweak the way you receive content on your news feed from the business pages you "like" - They have set the algorithm to pick up more "high quality content" in an attempt to pacify businesses that have been critical about their updates reaching fewer fans.



Facebook explains how they decide what is high quality content by saying; we decided to develop a new algorithm to factor into News Feed. To develop it, we first surveyed thousands of people to understand what factors make posts from Pages high quality. Some of the questions we asked included:

- Is this timely and relevant content?
- Is this content from a source you would trust?
- Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
- Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)
- Would you call this a low quality post or meme?
- Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?



We used the results of this survey to build a new machine learning system to detect content defined as high quality. The system uses over a thousand different factors, such as how frequently content from a certain Page is reported as low quality (e.g., hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and whether the fan base for a particular Page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality Pages. Coming up with an algorithm to detect this is complex, and we will continue to refine it as we get more feedback.

Once we developed this algorithm, we added it to our News Feed ranking algorithms as another factor to calculate the score of a News Feed story. We tested the new version of the ranking algorithm with a small segment of our users:1

- By showing these high quality posts higher up in News Feed, we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content
- People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall

For most Pages the impact should be relatively small, but Pages that are seeing good engagement on their posts could see further increases in reach. The bottom line is that your Page strategy should still stay the same: produce high quality content and optimize for engagement and reach.

So in closing, it would seem that if you are not putting out quality content through your feed; and most of those posts were not doing well to begin with, they will reach even fewer people. On the flip side, pages with good content will enjoy a farther reach of influence by continuing to put out quality posts. This is a double edged sword.