Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that some major changes are on the way to your Facebook News Feed. You’ll be seeing more content from friends and family, and less from publishers.
Zuckerberg says users have said they’re seeing content from businesses, brands, and media crowding out posts from their friends. He says Facebook wants to change this. Rather than “relevant content,” the social network will instead help users find “meaningful social interactions.”
Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.
Zuckerberg says the new focus will take “take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products,” with the News Feed showing the changes first.
We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.
Less public content will show in your feed, but the content that does display should “encourage meaningful interactions between people.” Zuckerberg says he expects to see engagement and the time users spend on the social network to go down, but that the time spent on the service “will be more valuable.”
Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.
At its best, Facebook has always been about personal connections. By focusing on bringing people closer together — whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world — we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent.
