Last month, Facebook launched what some considered to be its “Panda update”. The company revealed that it had tweaked the News Feed algorithm to promote higher quality content, and essentially give more weight to news stories over memes and similar content.

Facebook has now announced a further tweak.

The News Feed now treats text status updates from pages differently than ones from regular users. According to the company, it has seen that people write more status updates (9 million more per day on average) when their friends write status updates, but the effect is not the same with updates from Pages. Therefore, they’re not going to show text status updates from pages as much.

“We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types,” says News Feed ranking product manager Chris Turitzin. “This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.”

According to Turitzin, the best way to share a link on Facebook after the update is to use a “link share.” That means using the actual link option to share, as opposed to just including the link at the end of a text update.

It will be interesting to see how the new update affects visibility of posts for brands, who have suffered greatly since the last big update.

Image via Facebook