Facebook is ending its brief experiment to show more posts from friends and family members in newsfeeds.
In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social media service would show less posts from businesses and publishers while ramping up personal contacts. The stated goal was to encourage more interaction among friends and family.
The unstated goal was to lessen reliance on organic (i.e. unpaid) traffic for businesses and publishers that use the service as a tool to drive traffic. The longer game was audience retention and growth, which would drive revenue.
But in a company blog post from Adam Mosseri, head of news feed, Facebook now says it is ending its “test” of the Explore Feed.
“We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone,” wrote Mosseri. “Some of these changes—like Reactions, Live Video, and GIFs— work well and go on to become globally available. Others don’t and we drop them.”
The Explore Feed was instituted, Mosseri claimed, based on feedback from people who wanted to see more from friends and family. “The idea was to create a version of Facebook with two different News Feeds: one as a dedicated place with posts from friends and family, and another as a dedicated place for posts from Pages. You gave us our answer: People don’t want two separate feeds.”
Mosseri said surveys showed that users “were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.”
The move will likely be greeted joyfully by content creators, businesses and brands that spend a lot of time and staffing on social media efforts.
The original reason for the changes was cited in a study the service published in which it found that those who don’t interact with Facebook are not as happy as those who frequently comment.
“We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being,” Zuckerberg said. “The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being.”