All writers and publishing professionals need to avoid posts that earn negative feedback from readers. These posts can affect your future Facebook performance.
Facebook recently revealed how the company tracks negative feedback from users. There are four kinds of negative feedback on Facebook, when a user makes the following decisions: to “hide all stories from a Page,” to “hide hide this story,” to “unlike a page” or to “report an object as a spam.”
Facebook’s secret EdgeRank algorithm takes into account this negative feedback, and it affects how many people see your posts. You should avoid posting spammy announcements, potentially annoying notes, unsolicited wall posts or other kinds of posts readers are likely to give negative feedback.
EdgeRank Tracker blog had more commentary from Facebook’s news feed product manager Will Cathcart. Here’s an excerpt:
To paraphrase Cathcart, pages that have received a lot of complaints in the past, will struggle with Reach today. This is an incredibly interesting piece of information … Cathcart went on to explain “we started penalizing things that had an above average rate of complaints, and rewarding things that had a below average rate of complaints. Facebook believes the change was a success because engagement went up” and “complaints went down in the double-digit percentage.”