Facebook new update may upset page owners

By: Salma Tantawi

As a part of a series of updates aiming to improve content quality on its homepage, Facebook has made another prioritizing move to the content you see every day from friends and pages you’re connected with on the network.

Facebook has found out that the more text update you read on your timeline, such as status updates, the more you are likely to contribute with a status update yourself. In a test done by the network, an additional 9 million status update a day was added after other text updates were highlighted.

However, this only works when users see status updates from their friends, not business pages they ‘like’. Thus, Facebook is once again working to differentiate between the two in order to push the updates that users are more likely to be looking for.

“We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types. This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect 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 wrote.

As a compensating tip, Facebook advices page owners to seek content their own fans are interested in, and not necessarily text status updates.