What does the Facebook News Feed algorithm mean to business?
Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan – FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Facebook recently announced it has rolled out a couple of changes to its News Feed algorithm that are supposed to better determine which posts should appear in users’ feeds. So, if you’ve read bits and pieces about Facebook’s Story Bumping and Last Actor changes and want to know what the two concepts mean for your business, then you’d better read on…
Facebook is trying to come up with new strategies to determine which stories should appear in users’ News Feeds. In a post published on the Facebook for Business Blog it was stated that the average user has about 1,500 stories from friends and Fan pages that he could see in a given day. However, as you can imagine, the more stories a user sees, the lower the engagement. The ideal would be about 300 stories that a user is actually interested in seeing/ reading about.
So, the purpose of these changes is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. In other words, Facebook is sorting and showing or hiding content to a user based on this likes, hides and interactions (comments, shares, etc).
The two new changes include:
Story Bumping which shows older stories that a specific user might have missed. These are stories that the user may find interesting based on this previous likes and interactions.
Last Actor that involves real-time “signalling” to determine which stories it should show in a user’s News Feed. So, Facebook tracks the previous 50 interactions a user has done and uses that information to rank which stories should show in his feed.
Driving engagement on Facebook
So, what’s a business to do to ensure its post reaches their audience? Create engagement, of course. Creating interesting, useful and relevant content that produces interaction in the form of shares, comments, likes and clicks is the only way to drive engagement on Facebook.
Ask your fans questions or ask them to share their views on topics that they find interesting or controversial. These discussions will lead to more interactions which will ultimately increase the chances of your story appearing in News Feeds even if it was missed the first time it was published. See how this works?
What’s your best advice for driving engagement on Facebook as a business?
