Your Facebook News Feed is about to get a lot better at showing you the things you want to see, which means businesses may have even more trouble fighting for attention on the social media battlefield.

According to Adam Mosseri, VP of Product Management at Facebook, the social network is changing up the way it ranks posts on News Feed, and friends will now have a much higher priority than publishers.

“Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family,” Mosseri said in a blog post. “That is still the driving principle of News Feed today. Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down.”

“To help make sure you don’t miss the friends and family posts you are likely to care about, we put those posts toward the top of your News Feed.”

Aside from posts by friends, Mosseri explained that most users want to see content in their News Feed that is either informative, such as a major breaking news story, or entertaining, such as a particularly good cat gif.

What does this mean for businesses?

In a separate blog posts aimed at publishers, Facebook Engineering Director Lars Backstrom explained how this change may result in less page traffic for some businesses on Facebook.

“Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages,” Backstrom said. “The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts”

“We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends.”

Essentially, what this means is that businesses will need to be even more social media savvy to reach their audience on Facebook, as they will need to produce content that Facebook users will actually want to share with their friends.

Image courtesy of Facebook Inc