Facebook News Feed Changes: Promoting Your Friends, Limiting Others’ Reach

Facebook announced changes to its news-feed algorithm that will result in people seeing more posts from their friends, while making it harder for companies to drum up traffic through unpaid posts. It tweaked the algorithm as part of a long-running effort to show more relevant content, the company said.

Late in 2014, Facebook took steps to cut the number of promotional posts in the news feed. Facebook said it made three changes: It relaxed a rule preventing users from seeing multiple posts from the same sources; it will promote photos, videos and updates from a user’s friends higher in the news feed; and it will show users fewer updates about friends “liking” or “commenting” on a particular article or post. Those stories will be dropped lower in the news feed, or not shown at all. Facebook made the changes after asking people to rate their news feeds. In general, people said they didn’t like seeing stories about their friends liking or commenting on a post, the company said. The steps will make it tougher for businesses and community groups to reach as many users without paying for ads. Facebook, which has 1.4 billion monthly users, has become a key source of traffic for publishers.