Facebook Makes The Trending Topic Section Better In Three Ways

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Facebook made changes to their woeful trending page which was way behind competition and it has gone through trials since then. The trending topics were initially curated by an internal group in the company only to be replaced by algorithms later on. There is still work to be done and Facebook is showing commitment to that fact by releasing three updates to the trending section.

Publisher Headlines is the first feature in this list where Facebook will now display the article’s headline within the trending topics. The headline that appears will be selected based on the engagement around the article, engagement around the publisher and whether other articles are linking to it. Apparently it was the most requested feature and it will look like this:

Facebook also has added an improved system to identify topics that are trending. Previously, topics may have trended due to high engagement but in the new system, they will look at the number of publishers posting articles on Facebook about it and the engagement among them. This will allow to surface these trending topics quicker and be better at capturing a broad spectrum of news.

Another addition is that people from the same region will see the same topics. This is like what we toggle on Twitter and now will be effected in the trending topic. It replaces the previous system where topics were personalized based on someone’s interests.

The new features are currently being rolled out but starting with US first but the company says that they will make it available to more countries in the future.