Friends and family come first in Facebook?s News Feed, as the social network detailed the latest tweak to its algorithm and detailed the values that guide that algorithm.
Engineering director Lars Backstrom announced the algorithm update in a Newsroom post, saying that posts from friends will be ranked higher in News Feed than posts from pages. He wrote:
Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to?starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That?s why today, we?re announcing an upcoming change to News Feed ranking to help make sure you don?t miss stories from your friends.
We?ve heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about. For people with many connections, this is particularly important, as there are a lot of stories for them to see each day. So we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed. As for the change?s impact on pages, Backstrom wrote:
Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some pages. The specific impact on your page?s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact th...