Did you know...
It's estimated that about 700 million people use Facebook's newsfeed each and every day.
And with that many people sharing cat pictures and inspirational quotes on the social platform the news feed can become pure whitenoise.
Facebook knows this.
And they also know that if your news feed experience sucks you'll bail from their network pretty fast.
That's why they tinker, tweak and manipulate what's shown on your newsfeed(out of a potential average 1500 potential stories from friends, people you follow and pages you've liked).
Finally coming up with their Edgerank algorithm.
The reason in their words, "With so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information. Our ranking isn't perfect, but in our tests, when we stop ranking and instead show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read and the likes and comments they make decrease."
Every time you like, lurk or share something on facebook the algorithm takes notice. Facebook explains this further, "When a user likes something, that tells News Feed that they want to see more of it; when they hide something, that tells News Feed to display less of that content in the future. This allows us to prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day."
The News Feed Algorithm responds to signals from you, including, for example:
* How often you interact with the friend, Page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
* The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
* How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past
* Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post
The Post Bumping Update (A Better Way to Surface Older Stories)
Recently facebook announced an update to the News Feed ranking algorithm.
This update takes into account that a vast majority of user of the platform do not actually scroll down the page to see relevant stories.
So to combat this facebook will magically have these posts reappear near the top of the News Feed if these stories are still getting lots of likes, comments and overall engagement.
According to facebook the early tests of this news feed iteration look promising, "In a recent test with a small number of users, this change resulted in a 5% increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from friends and an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they saw from Pages."
The 57% Factor
They go on to say that the average user only reads about 57% of of the news in their feeds. Why? Users don't scroll far enough down the page. This means that we're missing about 43% of all the things happening in our friends and families lives (as shared on the social platform).
Facebook is suggesting that this update, "...does a better job of showing people the stories they want to see, even if they missed them the first time. For Page owners, this means their most popular organic Page posts have a higher chance of being shown to more people, even if they're more than a few hours old."
This update does not effect advertisers and how paid content appears in the feed.
What do you think about these tweaks?
The MyBizMailer Team