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AN E-NEWS BRIEFING ABOUT WEB TECHNOLOGY & INTERNET TRENDS September 11, 2013
Solutions

Learning About the New Facebook Metrics

By Janet Fouts, CLICK Contributor


Some important changes are taking place on Facebook around the way the site measures how popular and therefore worthy of being seen by your fans your posts are. We've been saying for years that the quality of the content your produce is more important than quantity, and it seems Facebook agrees. Edgerank, the algorithm Facebook previously used to measure value, is being revised. Now they're calling it the "News Feed Algorithm."

The old Edgerank was based on three elements. Affinity, Weight and Time decay.

  • Affinity is affected by how users interact with your content. Likes, comments, shares and clicks are all ways to show affinity.
  • Weight is the value of those actions. For example a comment has more weight than a like.
  • Time decay basically means that the older the post the less valuable it is and therefore it doesn't need to be shown.

The new algorithm leaves out the time decay portion and focuses more on the interactions. In fact, if an older post starts to get some new comments it can actually rise to the surface and appear again in people's News Feeds.

According to Facebook, it's like this:

The News Feed algorithm responds to signals from you, including, for example:

  • How often you interact with the friend, page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted.
  • The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular.
  • How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past.
  • Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post.

Early data suggests the new algorithm is increasing interaction rates. Most people scan their News Feed quickly and miss a lot of posts. When those posts are re-introduced to the News Feed again users have more opportunity to interact with them.

Facebook says:

Previously, people read 57 percent of the stories in their News Feeds, on average. They did not scroll far enough to see the other 43 percent. When the unread stories were resurfaced, the fraction of stories read increased to 70 percent.

Time will tell how this works for you, but my advice is to keep creating high quality content and encourage your fans to comment and share!

For more details, check out important information on Facebook's Business News page.

 

Janet Fouts is a social media coach who helps individuals and corporations figure out how to use social media as part of their outreach and marketing program. She's a frequent speaker at conferences, conducts workshops, training sessions and webinars around social media and online marketing and has authored three books on social media, "Social Media Success," "#Socialmedia PR tweet," and "#Socialmedia Nonprofit tweet." TatuDigital is a full service inbound marketing agency, co-founded by Fouts.



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