Facebook’s Next Algorithm Change

Likes and shares aren’t always what determines which content we want to see more of, and Facebook is developing a way to sift through it all.
Despite being one of the most widely-used social media networks in the world, Facebook often gets criticized for being a platform where shallow content, inane stories, and meaningless memes consistently dominate the stream of content. Whether it’s being shared by a publication or by an individual user, many of the links the Facebook algorithm appears to favor are what you might call “click bait”, not the pieces that people engage with, spend the most time reading, and that provide the most compelling user experience.
The fact that the algorithm has favored this type of content of course amplifies the power of the content itself. When a video of a cat or meme about Kanye West gets a boost in people’s feeds from the algorithm, it’s even more likely to be shared, thereby ensuring that it reaches ever more eyeballs. The self-propagating cycle is one of the key characteristics of virality, and the Facebook algorithm is one of its most powerful catalysts.
While at first this may not seem harmful, the effects it has had on the publishing industry have been significant. Publishing platforms are constantly trying to gauge how they can increase clicks. Because Facebook is one of the most powerful vehicles for driving traffic to their site, they are very much at the whim of what the Facebook algorithm favors. So, as this trend has peaked over the past few years, we’ve increasingly seen publishers create the kind of content they know the Facebook algorithm will select.
All of this is predicated on the idea that likes, clicks, and comments on Facebook mean that a post is valuable to a user. So it came as quite a shake-up last week when Facebook announced changes to their algorithm by stating that “we have learned that the actions people take on Facebook—liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post—don’t always tell us the whole story of what is most meaningful to them.”
Essentially, the change means that Facebook is adding another layer to its News Feed ranking which will “predict how long you spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed. This update to ranking will take into account how likely you are to click on an article and then spend time reading it.”
It’s interesting that Facebook chose to add this metric of reading time. Critics of digital content often point to the fact that sharable or “snackable” content has shortened the attention span of readers, who don’t want to spend time reading an article that takes more than a couple of minutes. But the preference for shorter articles isn’t necessarily the case; it’s simply what’s been favored on major networks like Facebook. By adding this extra layer into the algorithm, users will see a more diverse—and if it works, more meaningful—stream of content showing up in their feed.
So what does this mean for publishers? It’s possible that sites like Upworthy, Buzzfeed, and others who have predicated much of their content strategies on creating snackable content that the Facebook algorithm is likely to share will have to change course. And publishers that have been diverting resources from their deeply-reported and more considered work in order to create the kind of content that will drive clicks from Facebook might be able to focus on what they do best.
While no algorithm tweak is perfect, this announcement from such a hugely powerful platform could end up marking an inflection point in the trend of content online. Only time will tell, but with insiders at Facebook reporting that this idea is important to Mark Zuckerberg, it’s an encouraging shift for publishers who want their best content to shine.

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