How Facebook Determines What’s In Your News Feed

Facebook is the most important social platform for many artists and bands, but the problem is, once you start to get good at using it for promotion, FB goes and tweaks the Newsfeed algorithm, which changes everything works. TechCrunch recently posted an great overview on how the FB News feed works, as well as a whole list of algorithm tweaks, which I’ve copied below. What’s even better is that each tweak leads to an post specifically about it, so there’s a wealth of Facebook info if you’re willing to read for a bit.

Here are all the News Feed change announcements so far:

High Quality Posts From Pages – Timely, relevant, from a source you trust, you would share it or recommend it, genuinely interesting and not trying to game the News Feed, not low quality or a meme, wouldn’t complain, doesn’t get hidden, complete Page profile, fan base overlaps with other high quality Pages.

More Relevant Ads – Fewer ads that other people hide, Fewer ads similar to ones people have already hidden

Higher Quality News – More links to high quality articles, Fewer links to meme photos, related articles to ones you clicked, highlighting stories with new comments

More Status Updates From Friends – More text status updates from friends, fewer text status updates from Pages, more link share stories from Pages, fewer text updates with embedded links from Pages

MoreStories About Topics You Like – Page posts that tag another Page may be shown to followers of the tagged Page

Cleaning Up News Feed Spam – Fewer Page posts that explicitly ask people to Like, comment, or Share. Fewer Page posts that have already been shared by that Page, fewer spammy links that use inaccurate language or formatting to trick people into clicking

Focusing On Explicitly Shared Stories – More explicitly shared stories from third-party apps and fewer implicitly or automatically shared stories

Showing Better Videos – More videos people watch and watch for a long time, more videos to people who watch videos and fewer videos to people who skip videos

Fighting Click Bait – Fewer links that don’t tell people much about what they’re clicking to, fewer links to web pages where people don’t spend much time and come right back to Facebook, more links to web pages where people spend a lot of time, more links to web pages people talk about after visiting and fewer links to web pages people don’t talk about after visiting, more stories with links shared with the link format and fewer stories with links in the description or caption of a photo or video.

Incorporating Feedback About Ads – Using surveys about why people hide ads, fewer similar ads to ads someone hid because it wasn’t relevant to them, fewer ads shown to anyone that people hide because they were offensive, more heavily weighting the hides by people who infrequently hide ads

More Timely Stories – More stories that reference current Trending Topics, more stories shown soon after they’re posted if people Like them soon after they’re posted but Like them less later

More Control Over What You See – When you hide someone’s story, you can select to see less from that person in the future without completely unfollowing them

Reducing Promotional Page Posts – Fewer posts that solely push people to buy a product, install an app, enter a sweepstakes, or that reuse the exact same content from ads.

Minimizing Hoaxes – Fewer posts that people flag as hoaxes or delete after posting because they are scams or deliberately false news

Showing More Content From Friends More posts from friends instead of Pages, fewer stories about friends Liking or commenting on a post, more posts from the same sources for new users without much content in their News Feed

More Stories You Spend Time Reading – More stories that other people spend significantly more time looking at in their News Feed than other stories.

The See First Feature – A new feature lets you choose friends or Pages whose stories you want to see first at the top of your News Feed

Accounting For Differences In How People Hide Stories – People who hide an extremely high number of stories in their feeds including ones they’ve Liked and commented on will have their hides taken less into account by the News Feed algorithm

Incorporating Actions Taken On Videos – More videos that people turn on the sound for, watch full screen, or watch in high definition.

Improving News Feed For Slow Connectivity – Fewer videos and more status updates and links shown to people with slow Internet connections, re-showing stories you’ve already loaded if you have no Internet connection

Incorporating Reactions – More stories similar to ones you react (just as with Likes)

Surveys To Reduce Low Quality Viral Stories – Fewer viral stories that surveys say people would rather not see

Offline News Feed – When someone has slow connectivity, Facebook will re-rank previously downloaded stories by relevance and display them instead of a loading symbol

Incorporating Qualitative Feedback – More stories that surveys and qualitative research show people would be likely to both rate highly and engage with

Matching Reactions And Stories – Over time, Facebook hopes to show people more stories similar to the ones they React to in a certain way, so people who often use the “Haha” Reaction see more funny stories

Showing Live Videos When They’re Live – More Live videos shown while they’re currently Live

Incorporating Time Spent Viewing Sites – More links to Instant Articles and mobile web pages loaded inside of Facebook that people spend more time viewing, fewer posts in a row from the same Page

Prioritizing Friends And Family Over Pages – More stories from humans you care about, and fewer stories by businesses and news outlets

Punishing Clickbait Headlines That Mislead Or Withhold Information – Fewer news stories purposefully trick people into clicking by omitting or exaggerating core details

You can read the rest of this incredibly informative post called Ultimate Guide To The News Feed.