Facebook's news feed is changing again, this time with a shift away from 'public' posts from brands, businesses and influencers, and towards 'personal' posts from friends and family.

The changes were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg (via a personal status update, fittingly) with a follow-up blog post by Facebook's head of news feed Adam Mosseri.

This is part of the social network's attempts to respond to criticism of its service's proliferation of viral spam and 'fake news' over the past couple of years, as well as wider concerns about the effects social media are having on people's wellbeing.

"One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent," is how Zuckerberg introduced his post on the changes.

"Recently we've gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other."

Zuckerberg outlined the first changes being made to Facebook's news-feed algorithm:

"I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions... The first changes you'll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. As we roll this out, you'll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard – it should encourage meaningful interactions between people."

Mosseri reiterated the impact on pages, which will include those of influencers:

"Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses. As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease."

Panic stations for influencers? Perhaps not, but the changes will require harder thinking about what kind of content they post, and how they encourage fans to interact with it.

Live videos still rank highly in Facebook's news-feed algorithm, for example, so there remains mileage in broadcasting live on the platform.

Mosseri also explained that "Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect".

The downside of this could be even more influencers essentially begging for interactions, building on the trend we've seen on YouTube for people loudly demanding likes, shares and comments as their videos wind down.

The positive side of Facebook's changes could be a boost for influencers who genuinely are sparking debate: who have interesting things to say and an engaged community of fans discussing them. As ever with news feed changes, the true impact will become clear over the coming months – as will the winners and losers from this latest shift in the algorithm.