Facebook is trying to make your News Feed more relevant

Facebook is once again making changes to its News Feed algorithm – but this time the changes may actually make your feed more interesting.

Based on feedback from tens of thousands of user surveys, the social networking site said it is updating its algorithm to show users more relevant stories at the top of their feed.

“We saw through our research that people reported having a better News Feed experience when the stories they see at the top are stories they are both likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with,” read Facebook’s blog.

“We are making an update to News Feed that combines these two signals. News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story.”

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In other words, Facebook is going to try to make your News Feed more interesting to you personally – but they are also hoping you will be more compelled to interact with content on the site.

These changes are based on user surveys that you may have taken part in. Facebook asked people to rate random stories from one to five stars in response to the question “how much did you want to see this story in your News Feed?”

While the change won’t have much impact on the average user, the company did warn that page owners could see declines in referral traffic due to the changes.

Of course, users will still be able to manually choose specific friends they would like to see updates from first.

How to manually control what you see in your Facebook feed

If you want to have more control over what updates you see first in your News Feed, simply click the down facing arrow located at the top right of the Facebook homepage and select “News Feed Preferences.”

From there you will be able to prioritize who you see updates from first and unfollow people to hide their posts.

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