There is nothing more central, literally, on Facebook than the news feed, the middle column on the home page that displays news from friends and businesses that one follows, or on the smartphone with the only column…
Besides being the central point where ads run, it's also what keeps someone coming back to Facebook every time - although we often wonder how that viral video was found while a relative's post got lost in the depths of scrolling.
During a presentation at the F8 developer conference, Facebook opened up a bit more than usual about its official guidelines and advice, explaining how it decides what appears in its news feed, and how it's constantly trying to improve it. Chris Cox, head of the product, said that its goal is to show the 20 most important things every day to its roughly 1 billion daily active users.
Three broad categories of information go into what someone sees: from friends, publishers and merchants they've chosen to follow, said Adam Mosseri, director of product management for News Feed.
v Your relationship with your friends and how you interact with them
v The content, so if for example you look at a lot of photos, you will continue to see more posts with photos
v Activity on posts. For example, Spyros recently saw a post at the top of the page this morning, with a photo of his sister, because he had a person whose posts he interacts with very often: it was a photo he likes to look at, and there were a lot of comments from cousins and other relatives.
By the way, despite what you might think, all of your friends' posts will appear in the news feed, but they may also be buried at the bottom of the feed, and covered by new posts or by what Facebook's algorithm considers to be the most relevant.
The methods by which Facebook finds what it thinks are relevant posts have evolved over the years, and will continue to evolve. Lars Backstrom, Engineering Manager for News Feed, used to focus on the number of likes and comments a post received.
Still, the human element was largely missing, he said, so his team built tools that asked people what they wanted to see in their news feed. Facebook presented two posts and asked users to choose which of the two they preferred to see. If they fell in, fine. Otherwise, they went back to the algorithm.
Over the past year or so, a group of Facebook members has formed who are paid to tell the company which posts they specifically want in their news feed. They rate them with a 5 — the ones they definitely want to see — but they only make up 1-2% of all stories. A 4 means they want to see them, but not necessarily. A 3 means they wouldn't mind seeing them, but wouldn't mind seeing something else instead. And so on.
Facebook has become cautious lately about weeding out posts that are popular based on the number of clicks or shares they get, but that people don't want to see. Below are the three categories of such articles:
v Bait: 'Favorite animal?' posts that used to do well. But if you ask people if they want something like that, they'll probably rate it a 1 or 2, meaning they don't want to see it, so they don't get distributed as much as they used to.
v Scams: Fewer fake stories, which sometimes go viral, are appearing now, perhaps because users can click on the scam option.
v Promotional Posts: even if some people are fans of a page, they may not want to see a specific update. So, this type of content will not appear often.
Other factors that Facebook intends to use are the length of time users stay on a post, for example, if it is a video.
The most important message to the app's developers and publishers, hanging from Mosseri and Backstrom's every word, is too obvious to help: Don't publish posts that will annoy other users or provoke negative comments.
Unfortunately, they usually don't realize this until it's too late.
source: spinningsm.gr
