Facebook Tweaks News Feed: Text Updates Aren’t Working, Won’t Be Shown As Much

Facebook wants Page Owners to stop sharing so many text-based updates and instead try other types of updates that the company says get higher engagement in the News Feed.

In a blog post today, Facebook’s News Feed Ranking Product Manager Chris Turitzin says the company has tweaked the News Feed algorithm to downgrade text updates from Pages because they don’t perform as well as text updates from friends.

… the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. 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.

Turitzin specifically gives Page Owners guidance to use the link-share option when posting links so that the content being shared becomes more visual. He says link-share posts (like the example below) “get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds.”

This really shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Facebook has been moving toward a more visible News Feed, playing up the engagement that compelling images often get and rolling out video ads, too.

Facebook says text updates from friends encourage Facebook users to write more status updates of their own — but that engagement doesn’t exist on text updates from Pages. So the takeaway for Page Owners is that your plain text updates aren’t working and won’t be shown as often in the News Feed going forward.