How often have you been looking at your Facebook news feed, only to see a “breaking news” story that is days old and is now inaccurate, but you never saw it on Facebook while it actually was breaking news? Facebook is hoping to change this with some changes to their news feed that will promote news content higher.
They are using two factors in order to “rank” news stories higher in the news feed… trending topics and engagement.
Trending topics
Similar to how Facebook runs trending topics in the sidebar, they will be showing timely and trending stories in the news feed, and is hoping to jump on those trending news stories so that people might learn from them on Facebook first, rather than Twitter or another news site. So if you or anyone of your friends posts something related to a trending topic, chances are it will appear faster at the top of your news feed.
Facebook has discovered that changing to this news feed strategy led to a 6% increase of people engaging in those trending news stories.
It will also appear in the news feed with a “Trending” alert at the top of the post, so you are aware it is something that is currently trending and newsworthy.
Facebook will be looking at the engagement on stories, looking specifically at liking and commenting. While things like likes and shares determine the likelihood you see something in your newsfeed, they will now be taking into account when people are liking, commenting and sharing on these types of posts.
If people are engaging with the post right after it is posted, and not as much a few hours later, this suggests that the post was most interesting at the time it was posted, but potentially less interesting at a later date. Based on this signal it is more likely to appear higher in News Feed earlier on and lower at a later date.
They will also be taking this into account when bumping stories, meaning stories that appear in the news feed but someone didn’t scroll down far enough to actually see it.
How this change affects Facebook Pages
This isn’t technically a reduction in the visibility of Facebook pages. But it does mean the time you share might be more important as they will push more distribution to early when you post rather than over a longer period of time.
Jennifer Slegg
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