Facebook is continually working to improve News Feed and from time to time make updates to the algorithm that determines which stories appear first. Users and Page owners have said that they need to do a better job of communicating these updates. Starting today, Facebook is going to try and change that. News Feed FYI blog posts, beginning with this one, will highlight major updates to News Feed and explain the thinking behind them.
The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them. Ideally, Facebook wants News Feed to show all the posts people want to see in the order they want to read them.
This is no small technical feat: every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don’t have enough time to see them all. These stories include everything from wedding photos posted by a best friend, to an acquaintance checking in to a restaurant.
With so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information. The ranking isn’t perfect, but in the tests, when Facebook stops ranking and instead shows posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read and the likes and comments they make decrease.
So how does News Feed know which of those 1,500 stories to show? By letting people decide who and what to connect with, and by listening to feedback. When a user likes something, that tells News Feed that they want to see more of it; when they hide something, that tells News Feed to display less of that content in the future. This allows us to prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day.
The News Feed algorithm responds to signals from you, including, for example:
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How often you interact with the friend, Page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
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The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
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How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past
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Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post
Today’s Update: A better way to surface older stories
Today Facebook is announcing an update to the News Feed ranking algorithm. Now organic stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top of News Feed if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments.
Early data shows this improves the experience of News Feed:
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In a recent test with a small number of users, this change resulted in a 5% increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from friends and an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they saw from Pages
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Previously, people read 57% of the stories in their News Feeds, on average. They did not scroll far enough to see the other 43%. When the unread stories were resurfaced, the fraction of stories read increased to 70%.
The data suggests that this update does a better job of showing people the stories they want to see, even if they missed them the first time. For Page owners, this means their most popular organic Page posts have a higher chance of being shown to more people, even if they’re more than a few hours old.
The goal with algorithm updates is to keep improving News Feed. We’ll continue to keep you posted on the updates we make in response to people’s feedback. Stay tuned for more.
