Facebook surfacing more text status updates from friends, fewer from pages

Through testing, Facebook learned that its audience is prone to mimicry: If people see more text status updates, they’ll write more status updates themselves.

But that’s not always true.

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Over time, the social network discovered the chain posting effect doesn’t apply to text statuses from Facebook “pages,” which people treat differently from their own friends’ updates. That’s why Facebook has decided to differentiate between the two types of updates: It’ll hide more text statuses from pages and serve up more content from friends instead.

In an initial test, when the site showed more statuses from friends, the Facebook community wrote an average 9 million more status updates each day.

Page administrators can anticipate a decrease in engagement with their text status updates, “but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types,” wrote Facebook’s Chris Turitzin in a blog post explaining the changes.

Basically, if you operate a Facebook page, you should share more media- and link-based content to make up for the decreased visibility of text statuses. Everyone else, get ready to hear more “news” from your friends.