Facebook altering algorithm with ‘user choice’ priority

Social networking giant Facebook will bring about major changes to its algorithm again, this time with “user choice” as a priority to display home page.

The new home page algorithm will be coded on the basis of data obtained from surveying over a thousand people, Facebook said in its blog post on Monday.

The posts that have more probability of getting likes, comments, clicks and shares will show on top of the home page. “The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you.”

“We will rank stories higher in feed which we think people might take action on, and which people might want to see near the top of their News Feed,” Facebook said.

The management of public Facebook pages will be happy to know that this change will not affect their traffic flow as Facebook asserted that this update will not impact the "reach or referral traffic meaningfully for the majority of Pages."

“Pages might see some declines in referral traffic if the rate at which their stories are clicked on does not match how much people report wanting to see those stories near the top of their News Feed.”

“In general, Pages should avoid encouraging people to take an action (such as encouraging lots of clicks), because this will likely only cause temporary spikes in metrics that might then be rebalanced by feed’s ranking over time.”