Facebook will prioritize local news in Newsfeed

Facebook will rank local news higher in users’ Newsfeed. The social network looks to see if a particular page’s readership is concentrated in a particular area to see if it’s a local news source. According to Facebook, users value local news.

If readers are concentrated in a certain area, Facebook checks whether that page is posting news. Facebook sees local news as ‘quality news’ and therefore wants to rank it higher in the Newsfeed. Anyone who follows the page or has friends who live nearby who follow the page will encounter the messages sooner than is currently the case.

The change will launch first in the United States and will expand to other countries later this year, Mark Zuckerberg said. The move comes shortly after Facebook announced it will prioritize posts from contacts and family over posts from Pages.

How Facebook tunes its algorithm matters, because it determines what more than a billion people in the world see every day when they open Facebook in one of the apps or on the site. In addition, many businesses depend to a greater or lesser extent on traffic coming from the social network.