Facebook just announced a tweak to its News Feed ranking algorithm that will better differentiate between text updates from friends and text updates from pages for brands and news organizations.
Basically, Facebook wants you to keep seeing more text status updates from your friends, but not from Pages, which it thinks should share links.
Facebook found that when people see more text status updates, they share more of their own. For example, when Facebook tested showing more status updates to users, it led an average of 9 million more updates per day. It looks like seeing your friends share online makes you want to share too.
Text status updates from Pages were lumped into this cycle of increased views, but Facebook wants to put them in a different category. It tells Page administrators to expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, though they can expect to see more likes, comments, and shares of other types of stories, like links.
Here's an example of a text update with an embedded link from a Page:
...Versus a link update from a Page, which is what Facebook is encouraging Pages to use:
Facebook says that these link updates give people a more "visual and compelling experience."
This tweak is one of a number that Facebook has introduced recently, and is a reminder to publishers that relying too heavily on Facebook traffic can be dangerous. After all, the traffic Facebook gives, it can easily take away.
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