Laura Donovan — February 1, 2017 Follow @thewordpro

— February 1, 2017

Facebook revealed the latest update to their algorithm on Tuesday. In their Newsroom post, they announced they will be adding two new updates to rank posts in the News Feed by:

• Incorporating new signals to better identify and rank authentic content
• A new way to predict and rank in real-time when posts might be more relevant to you

Citing the reason for the updates, “one of our News Feed values is authentic communication. We’ve heard from our community that authentic stories are the ones that resonate most — those that people consider genuine and not misleading, sensational or spammy.”

Facebook looks at many signals to rank posts in each users’ News Feed, including how close the person or Page posting is to the individual as well as overall engagement that a particular post has.

New Signals Implemented

Facebook has implemented new signals to identify authentic content with this algorithm update. They will be adding universal signals that will determine a posts authenticity.

To do this, they have categorized Pages “to identify whether they were posting spam or trying to game feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares.”

The posts from these Pages were then used to train a model that will continuously identify if posts from these Pages are likely to be authentic. For example, “if Page posts are often being hidden by people reading them, that’s a signal that it might not be authentic.”

If the post is deemed to likely be authentic based on these new signals the post may end up higher in the News Feed.

Real Time Signals Updated

While ranking the feed to determine a post’s relevance, Facebook reviewed the real-time signals, i.e. whether a friend had just commented on the post. Today’s updates will now consider how the signals “change in real time.”

If a post has a lot of engagement from many Facebook users or if the post is getting a lot of engagement, Facebook can see in real-time that the topic or Page post may be temporarily more important to the user. This content will then rank higher in the user’s feed.

An example of how this works from the Newsroom post, “if your favorite soccer team just won a game, we might show you posts about the game higher up in News Feed because people are talking about it more broadly on Facebook.”

Facebook Business Page Impact

It is likely you will not see any direct impact or significant change to the distribution of content. Some Pages could see a dip in referral traffic or outbound clicks. Regardless of these updates, Pages should continue to post content and stories that are relevant to their audience.

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