Facebook wants to clean your News Feed for more quality, less spam

It happens to everyone. You’re scrolling through your News Feed, looking at baby photos and hastily piling on a friend’s birthday with your own “happy birthday” post when a jarring before-and-after weight loss shot from some random company your friend liked pops up sandwiched between the updates you actually care about. Facebook is making changes to News Feed to prevent the annoying clutter from filling up your feed, and companies are probably not gonna like it.

“The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important and relevant to them,” begins a blog post from Facebook explaining these updates.

Today’s announcement, part of Facebook’s push to increase transparency about how News Feed works, lays out factors that will get your Page quarantined. Many of these have likely been in play for a while, and Facebook started punishing usage of image memes last year, but now these transgressions could with heftier penalties.There are three types of post that will be targeted.

• Don’t explicitly ask users to Like, comment on, or share your posts, either in text or photos. Facebook will detect this and reduce your reach
• Don’t share the same content repeatedly. Yes, it might be important to you, but your fans don’t want to see it in their feeds multiple times. If you need to share the same link, do it with a different description or photo each time.
• Don’t say a link leads to one thing when it really goes somewhere else. AKA don’t say “check out our photo gallery” and instead link them to an ecommerce purchase page or site with nothing but ads. Facebook will likely see that users start browsing their feed again a half-second after clicking your link because what was on the other side was a scam, and beat you up for it.

While these are all welcome changes for users, page-owners will no doubt be sceptical that they could be detrimental to their reach. Even genuine pages distributing content according to the rules have been adversely affected by Facebook quelling organic reach in order to encourage more paying advertisers.