As announced by Facebook on the 14th of June, 2019, the social media major is bringing some significant changes in its Algorithms that will impact the reach of comments in News Feed. Comments with specific quality signals will rank high and have high reach while low quality comments may have a low reach.
How Comments Rank in News Feeds
According to the Facebook update these are not just posts that rank in the news feed but even comments also rank high or low based on their quality.
While comments with positive quality signals will rank the respective posts high and will make the posts to be seen by more people, comments with low quality signals will rank the posts low and will make it have a reduced reach.
Here are the Facebook Comment-Quality Signals:
Integrity signals:
Integrity signals are all about users’ integrity on the platform and improving the quality of comments people see. Comments that do not abide by Facebook Community Standards or fall into engagement-bait are considered as negative signals. Comments violating the platform’s Community Standards will be removed.
User-Indication Signals:
Facebook has been conducting user polls and using surveys to find out what types of comment users want to see and based on the results, the company ranks the comments higher or lower.
User Interaction Signals:
These are the signals that are based on how users interacted with the comments such as if they liked the comment, reacted to it or replied to the comment.
Moderation Signals:
These signals are about how users hide, delete or engage with comments made in their posts.
Given below is how Facebook described it:
“People can moderate the comments on their post by hiding, deleting, or engaging with comments.
Ranking is on by default for Pages and people with a a lot of followers, but Pages and people with a lot of followers can choose to turn off comment ranking.
People who don’t have as many followers will not have comment ranking turned on automatically since there are less comments overall, but any person can decide to enable comment ranking by going to their settings. (See more details here.) “
Making Comment Rankings Better!
As announced by the social media company, one of the main goals of this update is to promote high quality posts by the users and ranking low quality posts low in Facebook News Feed.
Here is how Facebook described it:
“To improve relevance and quality, we’ll start showing comments on public posts more prominently when:
The comments have interactions from the Page or person who originally posted; or
The comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted.”
This was just summarized information if you want to read the complete posts in words of Facebook, read it here: Making Public Comments More Meaningful