How Facebook is improving its news feed ranking

Facebook just shared some of their plans regarding how the Facebook news feed will work and improve to give users more relevant content and what they want to see more of.

Over the next few months, Facebook will be updating its news feed to provide Facebook users more relevant content. To achieve that goal, Facebook is gathering feedback from users.

The end result will be based on four different signals driven by user feedback.

Those four signals are:

1. Is this post inspirational?

Who doesn’t like more inspirational and uplifting content on their Facebook news feed — especially in these trying times.

One part of the feedback survey will ask people if they found posts inspirational. Based on that feedback, Facebook will recognize posts as inspirational, and that signal will be incorporated and considered for future news feed rankings. 

2. Is this post interesting?

To keep engagement high, it is important for Facebook to show highly relevant content to its users. After all, no one engages with content that they are not interested in.

So Facebook is planning to ask people if they are interested in certain topics and if they would like to see more posts on their news feed about those topics.

Based on that feedback, Facebook will be able to rank and prioritize content in users’ news feeds.

Posts that are more interesting to users will appear closer to the top. Moreover, we can also expect more posts around those topics that users mark as interesting.

3. Do you want to see less of these posts?

Facebook wants to know which posts are not interesting to the majority of people so it can deprioritize them in the news feed rankings.

This feedback will be gathered by how people react to certain posts. For example, a post will be deprioritized if it gets lots of angry reactions.

4. Do you want to hide this post?

Facebook users can hide posts that they do not like, but Facebook is making it even easier to do so.

This will also serve as a ranking signal to improve the news feed experience.

Here is what Facebook said about this feedback process:

“While a post’s engagement — or how often people like it, comment on it, or share it — can be a helpful indicator that it’s interesting to people, this survey-driven approach, which largely occurs outside the immediate reaction to a post, gives a more complete picture of the types of posts people find most valuable and what kind of content detracts from their News Feed experience.”

This news feed rankings will be adjusted over the next few months, based on the feedback Facebook receives from users.