When I heard there was a new Facebook algorithm coming out, I geared myself up for a ranty blog about spoonfed social and curated Instagram algorithms.

However, for once Facebook might have actually got something right. Your old newsfeed was populated with content you interacted with the most. Can’t see a problem with this? We can. There’s plenty of content you might not interact with – e.g you might not like a sad status update, or comment on an article you thought was great simply because you didn’t feel the need to.

Not everyone is interactive on Facebook – not to say they aren’t active in using it, but they’re just passive in interaction. Put simply, the actions people take on Facebook might not reflect what they want to see at the top of their feed.

Facebook recognised this flaw and has updated with what might be the first good algorithm update on social media for a while. Your newly improved newsfeed will be based on how long you spend viewing things, instead of how you react to them. So rather than drawing the data from your Facebook, it’ll draw it from what you’re clicking on away from Facebook.

It will be predicting how long you will spend looking at things using data on what you’ve already spent time looking at. Those dodgy clickbait titles (you won’t BELIEVE how many appear on Facebook a day *smashes head on desk*) that you click on, realise within 10 seconds that it’s terrible and click off again, won’t appear at the top of your feed anymore. Yay!

The things you spend the most time looking at, be it cat videos (guilty) or fantastic blog posts about social media (*cough* 24 fingers *cough*), will be what appears at the top. For once, things that are genuinely relevant for you will be up there.

Thank you new Facebook algorithm, thank you.

What does this mean for businesses? It means you have got to know your audience. Really know them. What you post has got to be relevant to what your followers want to see, or it won’t appear at the top of their feed. Simple.


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