Things move quickly on earth of social media. Just below two months ago I wrote about ways Facebook business pages can improve their EdgeRank scores. Then last week, on August 6, Facebook announced its News Feed algorithm update that spells the top to the EdgeRank algorithm — affinity, weight, and time decay — and the start of more regular News Feed algorithm updates. Facebook’s announcement is analogous to Google’s search engine marketing updates, as Facebook now has a dedicated News Feed optimization team and apparently intends to extend transparency in regards to the News Feed to page administrators.
The News Feed update remains to be greatly reliant to your ability to generate quality and interesting content in your Facebook business page. Facebook presumably must feature quality content on its users’ News Feeds to make Facebook an enticing place for individuals to spend more time on and return for more content — which also makes a more compelling proposition to advertisers.
What Has Changed?
Facebook will start ranking stories on its users’ News Feeds in response to the subsequent three updates.
- Story bumping. Whenever you log into your News Feed, Facebook would begin to “bump up” and have older engaging posts it considers relevant to you instead of only “new” relevant posts.
- Last actor. Facebook will begin to note the last 50 people and pages a user has engaged with and provides more weight to posts from these 50 people and pages within the user’s News Feed.
- Chronological by actor. Facebook’s News Feed would soon begin to show posts in a chronological order — corresponding to Twitter — from specific users. It really is currently in development and never yet live.
I will expand on all the three updates.
‘Time Decay’ Replaces ‘Story Bumping’
The “Time Decay” factor of the now defunct EdgeRank algorithm used to favor showing newer stories over older ones on Facebook users’ News Feed. Even in instances where posts went viral or had an affordable amount of engagement, if the timing was wrong or off by a couple of hours, users often missed viewing them on their News Feeds as they got buried by newer posts.
The “story bumping” update aims to mend the Time Decay issue by “bumping” up older but relevant stories on users’ News Feed no matter if they’re quite a lot of hours old. Story bumping will select recent stories that aren’t just new but new to you. With story bumping, in other words, relevancy is given more prominence over timing.
Facebook’s initial tests shows that story bumping can result in an 8 percent increase in Likes, comments, and shares on stories from business pages, and that 70 percent of visible News Feed stories (up from 57 percent) at the moment are read by users as unread stories are re-featured on News Feeds — which spells opportunity for business pages.
‘Last Actor’ Replaces ‘Affinity’
The new “last actor” factor takes under consideration and keeps track of a user’s last 50 interactions with friends and pages using activities such recent conversations, Likes, shares, photo or album views, and comments to assist prioritize posts that may be featured above the fold at the user’s news feed.
As with the sooner concept of affinity, the more those that interact with a Facebook page, the much more likely they’ll see updates from the page at some point. What makes last actor different is that there’s now a fixed collection of the highest 50 interactions that might take delivery of more priority.
Interactions with a page by a user similar to Likes, comments, and shares are viewed by Facebook as votes by a user to add more posts from the page on their News Feeds. Facebook assigns a score to future posts in line with previous interactions. With last actor, recency plays a major role in Facebook’s future post scoring.
Chronological by Actor
Although currently in development with a planned future release, the “chronological by actor” factor aims to peer through and understand a chain of posts from a specific user or page after which display these posts as a single series in chronological order the image of a Twitter feed. This can make Facebook a contender to “live-tweeting” an event, because it will be ideal for chronicling events.
What is unclear at the present is how Facebook would determine which stories it is going to show chronologically and which it might show in line with its normal relevance ranking.
Key Takeaways of Managing Your Facebook Page
Here are five how one can increase relevancy for story bumping and increase interaction for last actor engagement in your Facebook page.
Conclusion
Remember this excerpt from Facebook’s News Feed announcement blog post: “The goal of reports Feed is to deliver the best content to the correct people on the right time so that they don’t miss the stories which are important to them. Ideally, we would like News Feed to expose all of the posts people wish to see within the order they need to read them.”
In short, for anyone managing a Facebook page, publish the correct content on your audience members and Facebook will sort the remainder by delivering it to their News Feeds.