Old stories that still get likes and comments will resurface in your News Feed.
Facebook recently announced an important News Feed ranking algorithm update, that will ensure that your popular stories still appear in the feed, even when they are no longer “fresh” content. The algorithm will calculate likes and comments to resurface engaging content.
The News Feed algorithm usually responds to signals from the users, including how often you interact with other users who posted; how many likes, shares and comments a post receives; how much you have interacted with this type of post in the past; and the number of hides from your network, and not only.
While these signals still play a major role in what you see, the new update will bring organic stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see back near the top of News Feed, especially if they are getting lots of likes and comments.
This is a great update for businesses: good quality, engaging content, is no longer lost in the buzz.
Facebook suggested that the update was tested on a small number of users and resulted in an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from Pages. Also, because people don’t really scroll enough to see all the news stories in their Feeds – they read only the first 57%, the update increases the number of stories read to 70%, by resurfacing interesting stories that users didn’t notice in the first place.
There are two important considerations for businesses regarding this update:
- Organic Page posts have a higher chance of being shown to more people, even if they’re more than a few hours old.
- The change does not impact how paid content appears in News Feeds.
The challenge for businesses hasn’t changed: how do you create content that is engaging enough to become viral without being promoted to move it higher in News Feeds.