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Facebook updates how Pages appear in News Feeds and offers advice on sharing links for maximum engagement

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

January 21, 2014 | 4 min read

Facebook has made another update to News Feed, this time one that will see text status updates from friends and text status updates from Pages treated differently.

“Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves. In fact, in our initial test when we showed more status updates from friends it led to on average nine million more status updates written each day. Because of this, we showed people more text status updates in their News Feed,” said Facebook in a blog post.

“Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn't true for text status updates from Pages. As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends.”

The improved algorithm will now differentiate between the two, ultimately giving people more of the content they want to see.

But what does this mean for Pages?

Facebook said Page admins will see a “decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.”

Facebook then went on to advise on the type of content that generates engagement, saying that it has seen an increase in the number of likes and comments a link share receives based on how it is embedded.

Some Page owners embed the link in the status update.

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {

FB.init({

appId : '{your-app-id}',

status : true,

xfbml : true

});

};

(function(d, s, id){

var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];

if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}

js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;

js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js";

fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);

}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

However, Facebook suggested that the best way to share a link after this update was to use a link-share, so that it features a snippet of the content and an image.

“We've found that, as compared to sharing links by embedding in status updates, these posts get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds,” Facebook said.

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