How does the Facebook News Feed Algorithym work?

Social Media Marketing- How does the social media giant decide who and what to put in your feed?

Facebook will always guarantee to keep us connected with our friends in exchange for various types of on-going advertising. The algorithms Facebook uses to decide what news to pass along is known to be unreliable or altogether hidden!

There was a one-month experiment carried out into Facebook’s news feed and the following discoveries were made:

• Facebook is seen to be biased against new additions.
  
• Most recent posts does not give a story.
  
• Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
• “Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
• You need to raise your visibility by getting people to comment on your page and updates.

Facebook, like Google with its search algorithms, it consistently refuses to go into details about how it picks and recognizes relevant content. For more information about how Google SEO Marketing works visit a Digital Marketing Agency.

Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly on your wall, while others are never seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you're shown? Does Facebook reward some activities without letting us know? And can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

So how was the code cracked on Facebook's personalized news feed.

An experiment was undertaken, creating a virtual test lab within the confines of Facebook and tracking thousands of news-feed items over a period of several weeks. A 60-year-old Facebook newcomer who allowed us to dictate and monitor his every move carried out this interesting experiment.

Like a half-billion people before him, Simonetti joined Facebook and began typing in his status updates. But in this case, Simonetti's only friends were more than two dozen volunteers at random who agreed to sift through their news feeds for the duration of our experiment, recording any sightings.

As our volunteers checked in with their reports, some remarkable findings began to emerge:

1. Facebook is seen to be biased against any new additions- Simonetti spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made "friends" never noticed anything on their news feeds. Those with well-established lengthy friends were a lot more visible than himself. Simonetti’s lonliness on Facebook only stopped when he instructed volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

2. Facebook's Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways. But you aren't likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don't have exposure in the first place.

3. The SEO Marketing of Facebook: "Top News": The real fun began when he eventually instructed different subgroups of his volunteer-friend force to interact with him in a controlled manner.

Suddenly, Simonetti began popping up on feeds. But which ones? The current newsfeed system offers users two options: "Top News," a highly selective feed of updates from friends, and "Most Recent," a "fire hose" that shows updates in reverse chronological order.

A bunch of interactions, however, still do not guarantee that you'll get on anyone's Top News, which is how a vast majority of Facebook users get their information. Some of our volunteers reported frequent sightings of Simonetti's updates in their Top News feeds, while others saw him rarely—and in some cases, never. Top News will show you hours-old updates from some friends while ignoring newer postings from others.

Facebook has a reason to do this: If users saw all of the posts for all of their friends, they might get bored and tune out—a disaster for Facebook, which needs eyeballs to earn revenue. But in doing so, Facebook's ranking system makes judgments about items it thinks you will be interested in.

What became clear after two weeks was that it's not the amount of activity you have, but the type of activity you have.

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