While many of us were sleeping, Facebook News Feed has got an update!!
Maybe you would have already seen tons of updates on your own feed about the upcoming changes and wondering what just happened.
Or ever wonder, how you see all those stories on your news feed and miss few?
According to Facebook,
There are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don’t have enough time to see them all
So how does Facebook know what stories you should see?? It has been EdgeRank all the way and few of us have even mastered the scoring algorithm and ensured that their stories get more exposure.
But listening to many of us, Facebook announced slew of changes last night to its scoring algorithm.
What’s New with Facebook News Feed
At the conference yesterday, they announced feature called ‘Story Bump’. The feature will help stories that are still receiving traction in form of likes and comments to still rank higher and appear on thew news feed.
In all it’s recent research, Facebook found that people only read about 57% of their feed and miss out stories in the 43% bracket. During their test with the new News Feed, it saw about 5% increase in number of likes, comments and shares from friends and about 8% increase in those parameters when the stories are from pages.
According to Lars Backstrom,
The data suggests that this update does a better job of showing people the stories they want to see, even if they missed them the first time,” Backstrom said. “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.
How does it effect you?
As content creators, your job might become a bit easier as the story that you have just updated, might still appear in the news feed if it continues to generate excitement. You would not have to bother about sending frequent updates of the same story. Just ensure, that you produce great content and get likes, comments and shares.
Has it rolled out?
Last heard, the roll out is automated and you may suddenly see the effect. So keep praying you’re next to receive it.
What do you do now?
1. For starters, just tell me how excited are you about the changes?
2. What would you like Facebook to do next?
Photo Credit: Simon
I would like them to be open about how much % of news feed would be ads.. And if not decided yet, to come up with a figure as to how much % of the enws feed will they reserve for a user to see as a sponsored post/ad.
Personally i would want that ratio to be around 5% of the overall news feed for a better user experience
Interesting take Omkar.
But can any platform be so open. Because if they start revealing it, people will hardly care to read those stories and that would ultimately kill the platform.
Personally, I would like none 🙂
Always excited about Facebook updates. Ultimately, this will keep the user experience attached to relevance. What are the people I’m connected to engaging with. Couldn’t agree more that the focus has to be on creating great content that has value to your audience.
eCommerce is coming to Facebook. Maybe unfortunate but all signs point to it. Example…Billio’s push with it’s Xpress Buy’ 2-click Facebook commerce solution. More on that here: http://www.verticalrail.com/2013/08/06/facebook-and-social-commerce-the-next-frontier-in-ecommerce/
Not a huge change Malhar, but it seems to be another positive…..read, NON negative lol…update for FB 😉
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Hopefully we will be able to read more stories, while Facebook’s own data suggests improvement, it remains to be seen how good it goes.
Well, it’s not a big change, but I believe it could be a good move on their part. It really matters to Facebook that people spend more time on the platform and for that, they need to be fed relevant stories.
If the popular stories move up, based on user preferences, am sure the engagement will go up and may be people will spend more time on Facebook.
Interesting take @verticalrail:disqus . I guess they are pushing ads more, but brands are really keen to take a step forward and leverage Facebook to enable them make a sell. So may be, we might see Facebook making it easy for brands