On the 10 April 2014, the Facebook Newsroom announced that they will be cleaning up and getting rid of all spammy posts.
The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important and relevant to them.
Today we are announcing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would. Our update targets three broad categories of this type of feed spam behavior.
Pay attention to the following three categories! Are your posts spammy?
- Posting items that explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive is called ‘Like-baiting’. Due to this ‘Like-baiting’, items that would usually appear lower down get shown higher up in News Feed. Facebook will be detecting and ensuring that these items no longer get the boost the don’t really deserve. This update will, however, not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans and focuses initially on Pages that frequently post explicitly asking for Likes, Comments and Shares.
- Frequently Circulated Content – i.e. that same cat picture you have posted five times or that video that has been floating around Facebook that everyone has seen. Facebook will be improving the News Feed to de-emphasize pages that post this type of content.
- Are you posting/reposting content with Spammy Links? What are spammy links? Links that promise to show one thing and deliver another. Don’t try to trick Facebook or your Fans – in the end it will only negatively affect your online presence.
[Tweet “Facebook – Are your posts spammy?”]
Will this affect my page?
The vast majority of Pages on Facebook are not posting spam so they should not be negatively impacted by these changes and, if anything, may see a very small increase in distribution.
