Facebook Ranking Tweak Will Improve Conversations On Public Posts

In an effort to improve the conversations found on some Facebook posts, the company has announced improvements to its comment ranking that will use a number of factor to determine which comments get more visibility. The ranking system is necessary on posts from people and Pages who have many followers, helping users find meaningful conversations through the hundreds of otherwise uninteresting comments.

Though many posts on Facebook don't get enough comments to make ranking necessary, it's a vital system for celebrities, popular brands, and other Pages and people who typically get hundreds of comments on a post. Many of these comments are simply users tagging other users, emoji, hashtags, and other generic, uninteresting content.

A smaller percentage of comments may be interesting, however, possibly featuring commentary from followers, responses from the original poster, or any number of things relevant to followers. Facebook's comment ranking helps ensure users see these higher quality comments toward the top of the feed.

In an announcement on Friday, Facebook said it's improving comment ranking on public posts with a new update. The company looks at multiple 'signals' to determine whether a comment is of both quality and relevance when determining rank, including how other users react to the comment.

Facebook looks at 'integrity signals' that may indicate a comment is using some tactic to bait users into engaging with it, and it also makes sure comments meet its Community Standards. The company has also been using surveys to determine what kind of comments its users are interested in seeing.

As part of its improvement, Facebook will rank comments higher if they have interactions from the person or Page that posted the original content, as well as comments or reactions that are from friends of the person who originally posted.