Facebook has announced it will be making some big changes to the News Feed starting in January 2015. Here's what you need to know.

Promotional posts are going

Facebook revealed in a blog post that it was cracking down on organic promotional posts.

“As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their News Feeds.

“People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content,” the company wrote.

Less is more

Facebook identified promotional posts as falling into three categories:

• Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
• Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
• Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads.
   

From January, Facebook will be clamping down on the number of such posts that appear in the News Feed. Importantly, Facebook pointed out that this won't lead to an increase in ads.

The takeaways for brands? It pretty much goes back to Social 101: start a conversation your customers are interested in, and continue to post interesting, relevant content.

Stats show the odd kitten pic never hurt either. 

To find out more visit newsroom.fb.com.

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