Facebook’s new algorithm for the News section will lead to many changes and decrease the posts of Pages. Here’s how to take action
In this beginning of 2018 Facebook has announced big changes: a more intense fight against fake news, more control over privacy and above all a new algorithm that will manage the posts we will see inside our personal News Feed. The News Feed is the news section, the one that welcomes us as soon as we access our profile.
All these changes aim to make the social network a more and more user-friendly place, where anyone who accesses their profile will find exactly what they were looking for. The new algorithm has already gone live and brings with it some interesting new features. In the upper parts of the News Feed users will no longer find the posts of pages but those of their friends and acquaintances. Facebook’s goal is to make users interact with their friends on topics that interest both of them. For pages this is a hard blow: Facebook has in fact announced that in the coming months will see a decrease in the number of interactions and shares.
Few people initially worried about what might happen with the new algorithm, but now that it is in operation many have noticed real changes in their news section. On the social network, even the classic chain letters have started to run with advice on how to “choose friends to see in the News Feed”. Logically, these are tips that have no value and do not bring results. Simple tricks are not enough to be able to “cheat” the Facebook algorithm. Does this mean that you have no control to customize your News Feed and see the posts of your favorite pages? Wrong. Even with the entry of the new algorithm, users can customize the News section using some tools developed directly by Facebook. Here’s how to do it.
How to customize Facebook’s News section
Facebook’s new algorithm gives more importance to posts from your friends and co-workers, taking it away from pages. This new feature may not please everyone: you may have friends who publish the classic conspiracy posts or phrases with “Good morning, Kaffe?”. And with the new algorithm these posts will be in the first posts of our personal News Feed. Fortunately, Facebook offers us the possibility to obscure them and customize our News section. Doing it is very simple: if we notice in the News Feed a post of one of our acquaintances that we don’t want to read anymore, just press on the icon with three horizontal dots present in the upper right corner and then click on “Hide post”. In this way all posts of the same genre will be hidden. If, on the other hand, we want to silence the person, we have two different possibilities: select one of his posts, press on the icon with three horizontal dots in the top right and then click on “Pause the posts of XX (user’s name on Facebook) for 30 days” or “Do not follow XX (user’s name on Facebook) anymore”.
How to see the posts of your favorite pages on Facebook
To return the posts of the Pages you follow in the first positions of your News Feed you need to change a simple setting. You need to go inside the page and select the “Page followed” button next to the Like button. A pop-up menu will open and you will have to click on “Show First”. In this way the posts of the page will be in the first positions of the News section. The procedure can be replicated for all the pages you follow on Facebook.