Today Facebook posted additional detail tied to how they define “high quality content” specifically tied to Pages. This is a follow up to the recent announcement tied to slight changes to the newsfeed algorithm.
From Facebook’s Blog…
“We used the results of a survey to build a new machine learning system to detect content defined as high quality. The system uses over a thousand different factors, such as how frequently content from a certain Page is reported as low quality (e.g., hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and whether the fan base for a particular Page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality Pages. Coming up with an algorithm to detect this is complex, and we will continue to refine it as we get more feedback.
Once we developed this algorithm, we added it to our News Feed ranking algorithms as another factor to calculate the score of a News Feed story. We tested the new version of the ranking algorithm with a small segment of our users:
• By showing these high quality posts higher up in News Feed, we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content
• People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall
These results suggest that this change shows more people higher quality content, and more interesting stories from the Pages they are connected to. We will be rolling out this update to everyone over the next few weeks.”
What should a brand page expect?
For most Pages the impact should be relatively small, but Pages that are seeing good engagement on their posts could see further increases in reach.
The bottom line is that your Page strategy should still stay the same: produce high quality content and optimize for engagement and reach. You can do this by focusing on these tips when creating your Page posts:
• Make your posts timely and relevant
• Build credibility and trust with your audience
• Ask yourself, “Would people share this with their friends or recommend it to others?”
• Think about, “Would my audience want to see this in their News Feeds?”
This is important news as this is the first definitive statement from Facebook’s recent changes that are tied to increased organic reach on behalf of brands. While it is still unclear to what extend organic reach can be impacted, it is a positive sign that there are opportunities to increase organic reach through engaging & relevant content.
Follow Tom Edwards @BlackFin360
