Over the past few years, publishers have experienced immense traffic references from Facebook. Over the last 18 months, referral traffic for publishers has more than doubled. Publishers post contents and links and roll them out through Facebook from their pages; millions of users interact with these posts.

Facebook brought their product management and user experience team together to improve the news feed experience for users. The idea is to create a balance between content being posted by pages and friends. Based on feedback from a pool of users, Facebook has made a few changes to its algorithm:

1. Same source; more contents

   People have a specific set of preferences and they like to consume as much content from that field as possible. However, there’s a different set of people who don’t have enough contents to browse through. Facebook plans to enhance the experience for these users by allowing more than one content from the same source. Previously, there was a rule in place to not allow multiple posts from one source but the rule is now being eased. So you don’t get to bombard your target audience with posts anymore. However, if they like your content, they might as well be overflowed with your relevant posts; courtesy of Facebook! Learn more on how to build a winning content strategy here and 5 Tips to Create Effective Visual Contents.

2. Prioritize posts by friends over pages

   Users are often concerned that they might be missing out on updates from their friends. Therefore Facebook is tweaking their algorithm to make sure that posts by friends you interact with most; their photos, videos, status updates, etc show up higher on the news feed. If the users interact with posts from specific pages that they care about, contents from those pages are also likely to appear on their news feed often.

3. “Rick likes Papparoti” will now be hidden

   Yes. You wouldn’t even know if Rick liked Papparoti or not! Why? One of Facebook’s latest updates will make stories about your friends liking or commenting on posts appear lower on the feed or not at all. This means publishers will see a drastic decline in second-hand reach.

Learn about the Latest Changes In Facebook

While all these new updates mean general users will be seeing more contents which they like and or engage with, second and third changes may not be in the best interest of the publishers. The circulation of posts will now fall as well as the second-hand reaches are lost unless users are interacting with the posts. To get around this problem, pages need to make better content and acquire more users. For increasing referral traffic, follow the best practices posed by Facebook.

Read more about the Facebook algorithm and how to crack them!