In an announcement made today on the Facebook Newsroom blog, an update to the News Feed algorithm is being rolled out that will result in less text posts being shown from business Pages, and more text posts being shown from friends.
Facebook details the reasoning behind this algorithm update saying they ran some tests that show users are more likely to post their own text updates when they see more of their friends doing so. The same was not true when users are shown more text updates from business pages.
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 9 million more status updates written each day… Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn’t true for text status updates from Pages.
Facebook wants to show users more of the content they want to see, so they are going to start treating test posts from Pages and friends differently. Facebook also let Page managers know they can expect to see a decrease in distribution of text status updates, but may see an increase in distribution for other types of updates.
When it comes to sharing links in posts, Facebook says the best way to do so after this update is through a link-share, like in the example below. Facebook says these types of link posts tend to generate more engagement:
Last month Facebook made an update to the News Feed algorithm to show users more links. According to what we’ve learned from Facebook over the past month or two, it would appear link-share posts are the most ideal for generating the widest distribution and most engagement from users.
