Facebook has recently announced the latest changes to its algorithm which will improve it’s user experience further by making sure you see time sensitive posts while they are still relevant.
You may have noticed since Facebook’s tweaks from August 2013 onwards, your News Feed has been prioritising stories that it believes you will be most interested in. However, this has meant that updates from friends and your favourite pages have no longer been shown to you in chronological order and so you may have missed discussions and updates when they were still topical.
The change may have come about in reaction from the recent criticism of the way that Facebook’s algorithms did not show the trending topic of the protests in Ferguson regarding the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, when compared to how active it had been on Twitter.
So, from now on when people post about a trending topic, this will now be shown as soon as it occurs so that you will now be able to see your friends and favourite pages input on these stories immediately. From Facebook’s early testing on this factor, they have fund that on average this update will lead to more than 6% increase in engagement; which is great news for all of us marketers.
The next part of the update will look into the rate at which users are engaging with your post. This signal will allow Facebook to discover if a post has been time sensitive by watching if it receives likes, comments and shares from the moment it is shared and then trails off a few hours later. This is an upgrade from the current algorithms which only look at the total engagement rate of the post and then will determine how high up it will be shown in your News Feed, meaning that posts which receive faster engagement behaviour will appear higher in News Feeds earlier on and lower at a later date.
Facebook has assured us that these changes will be rolled out gradually so that marketers should not panic about it causing too much of a disruption to their pages. And have again reminded everyone “Pages should keep producing great content that is relevant and resonates with their audience.” Meaning that if you’re a smart marketer, you won’t focus too heavily on the reach of your post, it’s the quality that counts.
As always, Facebook’s goal is “to show everyone the right content at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them.” It may also help to relaunch their hashtags that clearly never took off on the same scale as Twitter’s. Facebook understands that popular TV and events spark conversations on social media but when Twitter gives up the most up to date information with their chronological timelines, it could not compete on breaking news, even with its trending topics section.
What do you think of this update? Will your company start to use Facebook as a way to intersect trending topics in the same way you may already do on Twitter? Or does this open our News Feeds up to bad marketers who could jump on trending topics to push their spammy content? Let’s hope Facebook has got it right, but based on the success of recent changes we have faith.
Facebook Makes News Feed Stories More Timely
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