Facebook bringing family and friends in your face

Facebook has made changes to your newsfeed to let you see posts by family and friends first. (Yes, those two drunkards got married, and that couple had their 5th baby, will be stories you wake up to more.)

This change has been made by Facebook because they want to return to their core value of connecting family and friends and thus give them priority visibility on our timelines.

How this impacts your personal timeline

You will see that cousin whose pictures you ‘like’ a lot more on your timeline because Facebook will sense her news is  priority for you. Facebook has also stated that from their research, people want their timelines to be 2 things: informative (share current affairs/stories/news) and entertaining (in a humorous way, funny pics/memes/statuses).

The tech giant also shares that they believe in authentic communication they can tell which stories are most likely genuine by seeing how much interaction they receive and thus places the story in the top of our newsfeed. They also said we the users control our experience by giving us controls over whose or what content we can see. Think the ‘unfriend’, ‘block’, ‘hide notifications’, and ‘hide’ controls we can use on Facebook.

How this impacts a page you work on

Facebook anticipates that ‘this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts. We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends.’

Facebook ended by saying that they will make constant iterations to the newsfeed, to ensure that the timeline improves and will continuously seek feedback to make sure this is achieved.

Do you like this change, or would you rather have it show whoever posts first, whether page or friend/family?