Facebook, in its continual quest to keep eyeballs on its site and its ads, wants to make items in users’ news feeds even more relevant – and it wants to make sure they are actually seen and don’t get lost in the endless stream of posts.
Keeping it fresh!
That’s why the social media leader has updated its News Feed to make it timelier and weed out stale posts that may no longer be relevant – such as those about a recent sports game or event. Facebook said that in designing the update, it had focused on two key areas to find out what stories are most relevant at the time a user logs in to their account.
Those pivotal areas are trending topics and when users Like something or comment on a post. For the former, Facebook is now placing an emphasis on what’s happening right now; the big events of the day. So if someone posts something that’s connected with a trending topic, it will be placed higher up in friends’ news feeds, making it infinitely more relevant to what’s going on at the moment and making Facebook appear fresh and attractive to users.
Staying on Top of Technology trends.
As Facebook engineers were testing this new features, it was found that more people – just over 6 percent – engaged with such hot-topic posts, whether it was Liking, making a comment or clicking on a link.
As for when people actually comment, or Like something, Facebook focuses not just on how many people interact with a post, but when they do so. If, for example, a post gets a lot of Likes or comments just after it appears, Facebook will count it as being popular at the time and so put it higher up in the News Feed, while later on, if the interaction has tailed off, it will be much further down.
Facebook says it will also use this reckoning for its “bump” feature – where users don’t see a particular post because they didn’t scroll down enough and so miss it, and Facebook will bump it back up, due to its relevance and popularity, so people get to see it.
