Facebook Updates News Feed, Introduces Story Bumping

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Facebook rolled out another batch of changes to its News Feed today and also took the time to explain a bit of its process in determining just what users see when they visit the site. In an attempt to clarify just how and what users see, they also introduced a pair of new features and the elimination of an old one.

Facebook News Feed Gets Updated

Gone is the “Edge Rank” system and in are new features called Story Bumping and Last Actor. These are all part of their elaborate algorithm to determine just what makes the top of the News Feed.

According to Facebook, the new News Feed algorithm basically observers users’ interactions and takes into consideration the following:

  • 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

Essentially, Facebook takes all of this information and gives each post a score. They then use this score to help figure out where to place the story and possibly for how long and how often the story is visible. With the addition of Story Bump, stories that may not have made the top of the News Feed at one point may be reintroduced at a later time.

The Story Bump allows for stories that you perhaps skipped at one time to be higher up on the News Feed at a later time, as it will get cycled back into the feed with the current time’s story scores.

The other feature introduced, Last Actor, takes into consideration who users have interacted with recently and places a higher score on their future stories. If you ‘Like’ something from someone at 8AM, you may see more of their updates later that day. The same goes for gauging users interactions in recent months. Those they have interacted with more may be featured more prominently on their News Feed than other users.

It remains to be seen how this will affect, if at all, business page posts and how they will be scored. It stands to reason that they will be graded similarly, thus allowing your reach to be tied into who likes and comments on your page. In an effort to help make the algorithm and how they do things more transparent, they also are running a Facebook for Business blog to keep things out in the open. I can’t imagine it will be long before we have some more information on how this update can be implemented in a business’s social media strategy.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more updates and additional information as we monitor this change.

Sources
Mashable
Venture Beat
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