Facebook’s new tweak could show more relevant stories soon

Justifying the move in a blog post, software engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen said that actions people take on Facebook like clicking, commenting, sharing or liking something, might not always reveal what content is more relevant to a consumer

Justifying the move in a blog post, software engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen said that actions people take on Facebook like clicking, commenting, sharing or liking something, might not always reveal what content is more relevant to a consumer

Facebook is tweaking its News Feed again and this time the tweak will enable users to see more relevant (as Facebook decides with a survey) stories soon.

Justifying the move in a blog post, software engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen said that actions people take on Facebook like clicking, commenting, sharing or liking something, might not always reveal what content is more relevant to a consumer.

"As part of our ongoing effort to improve News Feed, we ask over a thousand people to rate their experience every day and tell us how we can improve the content they see when they check Facebook — we call this our Feed Quality Panel. We also survey tens of thousands of people around the world each day to learn more about how well we're ranking each person's feed," the engineers wrote in the blog adding that Facebook asked users to rate each story from one to five in response to a question like - how much of this story do you want to see on the News Feed.

The engineers said that the survey revealed that people are much happier when they see the stories they like on top of the News Feed and are highly likely to engage with them .

"We are making an update to News Feed that combines these two signals. News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story. We will rank stories higher in feed which we think people might take action on, and which people might want to see near the top of their News Feed," they wrote.

However, there will be some impact on metrics to pages on Facebook. While Zhang and Chen assured that there will not be much change on the News Feed, they warned they some pages might see incremental referral traffic and some might see a decline in traffic. "Pages might see some declines in referral traffic if the rate at which their stories are clicked on does not match how much people report wanting to see those stories near the top of their News Feed," they wrote.