We can probably all agree that there are too many promotional posts clogging up our Facebook News Feeds these days, but the big blue social network is finally stepping in to take action.
Facebook has announced that it plans to reduce the amount of promotional posts appearing on our feeds, in light of results from a mass user survey. "People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content," said Facebook in a blog post.
According to Facebook's findings, people generally get more annoyed with promotional posts from pages they've 'liked' than actual adverts.
In particular, users get miffed with posts that "solely push people to buy a product or install an app", posts that push them to enter promotions and sweepstakes "with no real context", and posts that lazily reuse the same content from ads.
Saving face
Facebook went on to add that it will be introducing "new volume and content controls" for promotional posts, allowing us to see more baby photos and holiday brags, and less of the commercial rubbish.
Facebook also says that these new changes won't lead to an increase in adverts on the News Feed. Zuck's social network uses different regulatory controls for ads than it does for promotional Page posts, the latter of which, it admits, haven't been monitored as closely as the former.
The changes will kick in starting January 2015, and Facebook has gently warned Page owners that violate the standards will see their reach "fall significantly over time". You've been warned.
