Facebook Is Making Changes to What It Shows You

In the continues battle to optimize and personalize each user’s experience, Facebook is making changes to what it shows you on its news feed. This has been a linear process over the past years, where the social media website has tried to find the most suitable method of making sure it delivers you the kind of information you truly are looking for.

If you recall the platform the way it was 6-7 years ago, you should also remember how it used to show you pretty much everything all your friends would post. Subtly, however, Facebook started changing and filtering out more and more of the posts that it detected as being less relevant for you. That happened for a good purpose – placing the content that the platform detected you were most interested in in the spotlight for you.

Nowadays, Facebook has decided to tweak the way preferred content is detected and displayed in order to improve the experience for its users. The company said that it now uses several factors – named signals by Facebook – that are meant to help detect the type of content you are interested in. Things such as pressing the like button, commenting, sharing and even clicking on posts will help determine your level of interest towards a person or topic.

These factors are split into two groups: firstly, the platform will try to determine what is the probability that you would like to see a particular story and afterwards attempt to detect what is the probability that you would also take action in regards to the story in question.

But while this cannot be any less than a great addition for casual users, it may imply radical changes for the other type of presence on Facebook – advertisers and the likes. Facebook Software Engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen have recently mentioned in an official post that as a result, some Pages may see some increase in referral traffic while others may find their traffic to plummet.

Usually, this may be the result of discrepancy between the clicks actually done on the particular page and the willingness that users actually have to see the posts and stories at the top of their list. Overall, however, this change should help balance the two types of factors that are taken into consideration when deciding what kind of information is being pushed to the top of individuals’ news feed.

This change comes after a rather long series of attempts done by the company to improve the user experience based on the type of content they are exposed to and the likeliness that they will spend more time on the website as a result.

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Nancy Young

When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.