Facebook has launched News Feed FYI blog posts to highlight major updates to the News Feed and explain the reasons behind them.
The social network used its first blog post to announce an update to the News Feed ranking algorithm.
Organic stories users may have missed because they were too far down the News Feed will now reappear near the top if they are still gathering likes and comments.
In a recent test with a small number of users, Facebook said this change resulted in a five per cent increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from friends and an eight per cent increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they saw from Pages.
For Page owners, this means their most popular organic Page posts have a higher chance of being shown to more people, even if they’re more than a few hours old.
Facebook engineer, Lars Backstrom, said in a blog post: “With so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information. Our ranking isn’t perfect, but in our tests, when we stop ranking and instead show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read and the likes and comments they make decrease.
“So how does News Feed know which of those 1,500 stories to show? By letting people decide who and what to connect with, and by listening to feedback. When a user likes something, that tells News Feed that they want to see more of it; when they hide something that tells News Feed to display less of that content in the future. This allows us to prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day.”
Image via Facebook
