In an
effort to make sure that users don’t miss out on the most important posts to
them, Facebook is structuring its algorithms to bump the posts it thinks are
the most important to a particular user to the top of the News Feed.
Engineering
manager of News Feed ranking, Lars Backstrom explained this new development in
a post. He explained that at any time a user visit the site there are about
1500 posts that are available to be viewed from friends and pages.
Of this
1500, Facebook will only show a user 300 posts. The previous News Feed has seen
people miss out on stories that are important to them. However, after tests by
Backstrom and his group in which they used criteria like comments, likes,
shares, etc. to rank a post, they discovered better engagement of users.
The post
with the highest rank was bumped to the top of the News Feed regardless of how
long it was posted after the user left Facebook. The same were also done for
pages. Some staffs of Facebook and a portion of Facebook users were tested to
see the effect of the change.
“Early data
shows this improves the experience of News Feed: In a recent test with a small
number of users, this change resulted in a 5% increase in the number of likes,
comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from friends and an 8%
increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they saw from
pages,” Lars stated.
“Previously,
people read 57% of the stories in their News Feed, on average. They did not
scroll far enough to see the other 43%. When the unread stories were
resurfaced, the fraction of stories read increased to 70%.” he said.
The other
feature that was included was the ‘Last Actor’ which take note of your last
conversations while you were on Facebook and the people involved. This is used
to customize your posts when next you log in to the social site.
This is
still in the developmental stage and more details will be known as there are
new developments.
“The goal
with algorithm updates is to keep improving News Feed. We’ll continue to keep
you posted on the updates we make in response to people’s feedback. Stay tuned
for more.” he concluded.
Posts
Facebook to roll out ‘story bumping’ in News Feed