If you’re one of those people who relies on social media to get your news, you might want to hit the “Like” button now. And again. And again.
Facebook, the social media giant, announced Wednesday it changed its magic sauce once again, trying to push the stuff you care about most to the top of your news feed.
Facebook officials say they moved your friends and family up to the top of its ranked list. Yes, Facebook does sift through the possibilities and guess what you want to see first.
“If the ranking is off, people don’t engage, and leave dissatisfied,” wrote Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president of product management for the news feed, in a blog post.
The company announced a return to its roots, emphasizing family and friends at the top of your feed. In general, I’m happy people get to keep up with their loved ones on the site.
Unfortunately, over time people began relying a bit heavily on Facebook to tell them what’s going on in the world. A Pew Research Center study released in May shows 62 percent of adults get news via social media, up from 49 percent four years earlier. For Facebook specifically, that number rose to 66 percent.
Those numbers worry me, because people want to see news on social media, yet the social media itself now shows less of it.
Even before the change, we’d have readers call to complain that certain stories weren’t on Facebook, even when the stories were on our page. We generate more stories each day than it makes sense to put on Facebook (we posted 114 items on LimaOhio.com on Friday), yet people wanted more and more specific stories highlighted there.
Obviously, as the guy in charge of the internet at a local media outlet with a strong internet presence, these statistics and changes concern me. People coming from Facebook accounted for nearly 30 percent of our website’s visits in June. Losing readers of any type, in print or online, could hurt our long-term viability and my short-term ability to feed my children.
But it’s more than money to me. At the core of my beliefs is people should know what’s going on around them. Sure, we’d love if you pick up a newspaper every day or go straight to LimaOhio.com to see what’s new. I acknowledge and accept not everyone’s going to do that. In those cases, for that 30 percent of people who end up on our website, I hope they find what they need of ours through other sources, including Facebook.
The company says it won’t play favorites with what kind of news you see in your feed. That means if you’ve liked The Lima News on Facebook, our stories should still pop up if there’s a reason for Facebook to believe you like them.
Facebook gathers a lot of information about you, as you can see on its “Your Ad Preferences” page at http://j.mp/29aKBXw. It thinks it knows a lot about you. As I look through mine, it’s pretty accurate (although I don’t know why it thinks I like wizards or Chinese characters). You have some direct control of your news feed using the site’s “Controlling What You See in News Feed” page at http://j.mp/29cDYpv.
The best move you can make, according to Mosseri’s post, is reacting to things that interest you. Hit Like if you like it. Comment if it’s interesting to you. Click on the link to learn more.
“For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, we’ll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won’t miss what she posted while you were away,” Mosseri wrote.
These help teach Facebook what’s truly important to you. It’s the only way you’ll continue to see the things you really care about on the biggest social media platform, including the news that really matters to you.
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