700 million people use the Facebook news feed every day but many don’t understand how it decides what appears, so Facebook announced today it will start publishing blog updates on how the feed algorithm is changing similar to how Google does. Facebook;s first post will be about “Story Bumping”, which pushes stories you haven’t seen above ones you have.
Before, the news feed would rate all the stories published since you last logged on and show you the best ones. But if one didn’t make the cut to be right at the top, you might never see it. Then if you came back a few hours later, new stories would have been piled on top and it was unlikely that you’d ever see it.
With Story Bumping, Facebook doesn’t just look at what stories have been published since you last look at the feed, but at all the recent stories you hadn’t seen — not just “new” but “new to you”. This way you see more relevant stories, even if they’re a little bit older.
Facebook said this increased 5% more likes, comments and shares on stories from friends, and 8% boost in intereactions for stories from Pages, and an increase from 57% of potentially visible stories read to 70%. People are reading a larger fraction of their stories.
As I wrote last week, Facebook could help people to refine their own feeds if they improved education about the tools available to filter, hide, and promote certain stories.
We’ll have more details soon.
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