Announcing three new Facebook improvements

It seems that Facebook have been doing some listening recently. That in itself is nothing new, as social networks are always striving to improve the user experience. However, Facebook haven’t just listened. They’ve actually acted too.

In fact, over the past few weeks the Facebook News Room have announced three important changes that are designed to improve the social networking experience for their users going forward.

Each change could have warranted a write up of its own, but I actually thought it better to bundle them into one post that serves as a single point of reference.

The changes are also outlined in the order that they appeared on the Facebook News Room and I’ve included a link to each original story for further reference purposes.

Click-bait articles now being suppressed

You may or may not be familiar with the term ‘click-bait’ but once I explain what it is you will undoubtedly recall seeing it on your internet travels.

Click-bait articles are those stories you see with a really eye-catching headline that is designed to stir your suspicious nature and make you click. But while these headlines are alluring, they tend to not give much away in terms of the article’s actual content.

This is click-bait and Facebook don’t like it one bit:

Going forward, Facebook are going to weed out this type of low-quality, spam-style story so that more pertinent updates from friends and liked pages appear in people’s news feeds.

Facebook will reduce the number of click-bait articles that appear on their site in two ways.

First, they will track the amount of time a user spends reading an article before bouncing back to Facebook. Their thinking is that low-quality articles will have a faster bounce rate than higher quality pieces.

Second, Facebook will analyse the ratio of people clicking VS the number of shares or likes an article gets. If something attracts a lot of clicks but few shares/likes, then it’s likely to be click-bait.

Original story: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/

A better ad experience

Advertising on Facebook is huge business and when someone is presented with an ad that appeals to them, it makes for a better experience all-round. Likewise, marketers who manage to get their ads in front of people who they appeal to, will see their efforts reap greater rewards.

Previously, hiding an irrelevant ad on Facebook was a simple one-click affair:

Going forward, however, Facebook are going to start asking people why they chose to hide a particular ad.

For example, if someone hides an ad and states their reason for doing so as being ‘offensive’ then there’s a strong chance that that ad will be found offensive by other people too and so shouldn’t be shown.

As well as collecting the reason, Facebook are going to also start paying more attention to those people who rarely hide ads. This is because Facebook deem the signal sent from these infrequent hiders to be much stronger and therefore carry more weight across the ad network.

Original story: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/09/news-feed-fyi-listening-to-peoples-feedback-to-show-better-ads/

More timely stories to surface

Facebook have come to realise that sometimes posts from friends and liked pages are more significant at certain times and less so at others. For example, during a live sports game or latest episode of a TV series, relevant updates need to appear in a timely manner. Once the event is over, however, those posts inevitably lose a lot of their significance.

It appears that trending topics are going to play a larger role in the future and Facebook will look to promote posts that relate to trending stories, so that they appear higher in people’s news feeds. This will ensure that any updates about a current hot topic are more likely to find their way to the top of news feeds.

Also, Facebook will look at the comments and likes that a post gets, paying specific attention to when these occur. They believe that a post which is fervently liked and shared soon after it has been displayed but then drops off a bit later, is more likely to be relevant when it was posted.

Posts like this will appear high up in news feeds to start with before gradually falling away as their relevance decreases.

Original story: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/09/news-feed-fyi-showing-more-timely-stories-from-friends-and-pages/