Facebook has decided to give less prominence to text-only status updates from brand Pages but will increase distribution and engagement of other types of stories like rich links with photos and videos on the News Feed.
Facebook has been pushing the limits in improving the overall experience on Facebook after it was threatened with a declining teen user-base. The biggest social network has decided to give less preference to text-only updates from brand Pages as they do not have a positive impact on user-engagement. In a blog post Tuesday, Facebook revealed that plain text-only status updates do not get the same engagement as photos and rich links, mainly for brand Pages. The theory works otherwise for Facebook account holders.
The social giant's latest move comes after concluding a latest research on user-engagement in relation to status updates. Newsfeed ranking product manager Chris Turitzin said in a company blog post that "when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves," but "this effect wasn't true for text status updates from Pages."
The testing done on the social media showed that status updates from friends led to an average 9 million more status updates each day. So Facebook encouraged users by showing more status updates in their News Feed. After seeing an unusual response toward text status updates from brand Pages, Facebook is encouraging users by increasing distribution of other types of stories.
Recently, Facebook-funded study by comScore revealed that the automotive marketing campaigns on the social network persuade people to consider the advertised auto brands and vehicles. In another attempt to improve the quality of the content delivered to users, Facebook updated the News Feed algorithm to include links to more "high-quality" news articles at the expense of meme photos that redirect users to different sites.
