Facebook has been working on improving the quality of content shared on their platform. The company has been bringing forward various tweaks and improvements. Earlier this year they set up a way to ensure the news shared on their platform is accurate. There have been many additions to the news feed such as Instant Articles etc. The Facebook News Feed has been maintained well by Facebook, and in their latest announcement, the company has announced that they now plan to give more visibility to faster loading webpages.
Google too implemented a similar algorithm last year where mobile optimized websites and sites had the preference on mobile search. Facebook is taking things to the next level with this. The company states in their Newsroom post that they will consider factors such as the internet speed and the general speed of the webpage. The Facebook News Feed considers these factors and ensures users see the kind of content depending on the network connection.
Users on a slower connection will see less videos appearing on their Facebook news feed. Facebook has also been employing techniques such as prefetching the content for those with slower connections as that helps improve the page load time by about 25%, which is a significant difference. The company states that this update will be rolling out in phases gradually over the next month.
What is quite interesting is that Facebook has not mentioned their Instant Articles even once in the whole post. Instant Articles work similar to how AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) works on Google Search. It is certain that Instant Articles are going to get a boost from this change in Facebook news feed algorithm. However, when contacted by Tech Crunch, Facebook replied that this move is not being made to prioritize Instant Articles. Stay tuned with us for more updates from Facebook.
