It’s becoming clear that brands looking to get their way into more fans’ and users’ News Feeds, there are two main options — advertising and getting a friend to share a message. Referral marketing is one way to get that important share.

Facebook announced recently that explicit shares from a third party app now hold more weight in its News Feed algorithm. But how can you get a Facebook user to willingly share your content with their friends? Offering some kind of reward or incentive works, according to Extole Vice President of Marketing Chris Duskin. He said that Extole’s clients have seen a lot of success with referral marketing, motivating fans and customers to share content and have the message spread across Facebook.

For Extole customers in Q1, 33 percent of acquisitions happened within an hour of a friend receiving a referral message from an existing customer. While referral marketing may be a little easier to do via email, Duskin talked with Inside Facebook about ways that brands can use this technique to get back into the News Feed.

via How can referral marketing counter Facebook’s organic reach problem? – Inside Facebook.

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is tweaked constantly to ensure a better experience for users and a more profitable experience for advertisers. The company announced the latest major change today, as stories shared automatically from third parties will receive a lower ranking in News Feed.

Facebook found that when a user posts content to News Feed through a third party or an app, that generally gets more activity than a post automatically generated via a third party. For instance, the News Feed post generated by automatically listening to a Spotify playlist or artist will move down in the algorithm, while an album or song manually shared via Spotify to Facebook will receive a better ranking.

According to Facebook’s Peter Yang, many times, automatically generated posts from a third party were marked as spam. Additionally, the users didn’t like how stories were being shared implicitly.

via Latest News Feed algorithm change: third party implicit posts punished – Inside Facebook.

Facebook announced the change to its algorithm on Tuesday in a post aimed mainly at owners of “Pages,” which are generally created for companies and public figures rather than individuals.

The company explained that it had previously begun showing more text-only posts in users’ newsfeeds, because internal tests showed that it caused people to write more status updates themselves. In fact, when Facebook began showing more text posts at that time, users posted an average of nine million more status updates each day.

But over time, Facebook realized that text updates from Pages didn’t have the same effect. So, Tuesday’s newsfeed change treats text posts from Pages “as a different category from those of friends.”

MORE: Facebook’s latest tweak means less text-only Page posts for you – NBCNews.com.

via Facebook Tries Replacing “Most Recent” with a “Ticker” Real-Time Feed Atop the Chat Sidebar.