Increase, re-use, recycle: why Facebook’s algorithm changes are good news

By Mark Frary

If you’re a travel or tourism brand, how do people see your content on Facebook? It’s certainly not by visiting your loving crafted Facebook page. Research by BrandGlue found that of the people who like your Facebook page, 96% of them never revisit.

So why are brands so keen to market themselves on Facebook? The answer is the newsfeed. 40% of all time spent on Facebook is spent on looking at it, more than three times as much as people spend looking at profiles and brand pages (comScore research).

This is why it is so important for brands to have a strategy for getting their content into the newsfeeds of their fans - also see this post.

But getting things onto newsfeed is something of a science. In fact, you need to know something about what is known as EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm that is used to decide the order that stories appear on the newsfeed.

There have been no publicly available hard and fast rules on how to game EdgeRank’s magic formula but essentially the rules have been this:

- Have a strong two-way relationship with your fan. If all you do is push stuff to your fan, it is unlikely you will appear in their newsfeed. If they are constantly checking your page and sending you messages, you chances are higher.
- Create content that fosters engagement. Shares are valued more than comments and comments more than likes;
- Post fresh content.
- Post the type of content that users do not hide or report.

But Facebook has just changed the rules subtly.

According to the social network, there is an average of 1,500 pieces of content jostling to be seen on any one visit to the newsfeed. Understandably, people do not have enough time to see all these so it uses the EdgeRank algorithm to suggest around 300 of these stories to users. On average, users read 57% of these.

The recent change now allows what is being called story bumping. Older stories that used to disappear off the bottom can now jump back up the agenda if they are still getting shared and commented on.

Facebook’s pilot of the new algorithm with a small group of users found that the 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.

Tellingly, when older stories surfaced, the fraction of newsfeed stories read increased to 70%.

And that has to be good news for travel and tourism brands.