Facebook pushing quality content to the top on its newsfeed
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Recommended Link: Facebook's Newsfeed changes
This Facebook update should be of particular interest to content marketers since it can potentially help businesses drive more traffic to their site based on their content. Facebook can already be effective in driving traffic given its reach. Indeed, in this update, Facebook announced that average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170% - almost tripled - in the past year.
Facebook has introduced two new ways to highlight quality content on its newsfeed as it says it can now identify 'high quality articles' that are linked to rather than less newsworthy content such as what it calls 'meme photos'. The main changes within the feed are:
- 1. Links to articles display more related articles
Selecting an article on the Facebook newsfeed will now display up to three related articles which are themselves popular, as on this example from Atlantic's Facebook page:
- 2. Re-surfaced comments from a story are boosted
New comments on a story which are 'popular' will be pushed again to the top of the newsfeed. Facebook's algorithms will recognise high level of engagement or recently added new comments, and re-surface the content towards the top of the newsfeed.
Facebook's research highlighted that 'Our testing has shown that doing this in moderation for just a small number of stories can lead to more conversations between people and their friends on all types of content.'
The Facebook blog post refers specifically to "media sites" and "news", so it's not clear as yet whether these types of business are specifically boosted, or whether this update can help all types of business. Have you seen this new feature "in the wild" yet? Which types of site are affected.