We have had lots of people asking us why a certain post did not appear at a certain time on their news feed on Facebook. Really! It can be annoying and frustrating. But Facebook doesn’t see it as such. The News Feed runs on an interesting algorithm as recently upgraded by Facebook. It was discussed at a special event at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters on Tuesday.
With a lot of information and updates on an average Facebook user’s timeline, he/she is only allowed to see an average of 17-20% of status updates from friends and fanpages. Why is that so? The reason being that, it is impossible to see status updates from all friends and fanpages that you are subscribed to in one day. So, Facebook has decided to helpJ.
The way people get to see status updates is based on many factors such as the relationship you have with the user who posted it, the number of comments, the number of shares, and the number of likes that the story has accumulated.
Facebook reiterated its oft-stated goal: to give users a “customized newspaper” highlighting the stories it assumes users will find most interesting. The process assigns each new story a score, placing the highest scoring stories at the top of the feed.
Prior to this time, each time a user refreshed their feed, new stories automatically moved to the top of the feed — even if they had a lower score than stories previously displayed. A change in the ranking process now enables older stories (stories that may have been posted earlier in the day but the user never actually scrolled through) to join the “new” stories at the top of your feed.
A recent study by Facebook found that this new ranking system led to a 13% increase in stories read, and a 5% increase in interactions (Likes, shares, comments).
Another change to the algorithm looks at a user’s last 50 interactions, putting a higher priority on the friends or pages they’ve interacted with most recently and making then show often on the News Feed.