The most recent change to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm considers the measure of time users spend seeing stories. The change was made in recognition that users don’t essentially like, comment nor share each story that is critical to them.
The change to the News Feed algorithm will take off “over the advancing weeks,” and will not essentially affect the pages.
The following outlines the sheer indication of Facebook’s announcement as reported by Mashable’s JP Mangalindan about this recent change on the popular social network.
Facebook News Feed changes again: Now it’s all about time spent reading
Facebook revealed on Friday that it has tweaked the stream of information you get on the service once again — this time to factor in the amount of time you spend looking at a post.
Previously, how high or low a post showed up in your News Feed — or if it showed up at all — depended on how much your Facebook friends liked, commented on, or shared it. But no longer.
“It’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story,” wrote Facebook software engineer Ansha Yu in a company blog post Friday. “Some people may spend 10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10 seconds on a story because they have a slow Internet connection.”
The solution? “We’ve discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them,” Yu added.
So if you spend a lot of time glancing over a News Feed post with photos from your sister’s wedding, say, Facebook now notices that, factors in how long the post is on your screen, and places any other photo-based posts from your sister higher up in your News Feed.
The aim is to make the News Feed more compelling and interesting for users and ultimately boost overall time spent on the social network — by treating time spent on a post as another measure of interaction. How often do you check out your News Feed, and linger on an interesting post without liking, commenting or sharing it?
This is also the latest in a long series of News Feed tweaks Facebook makes for accuracy and relevance. This April, for example, the social network announced it had adjusted the News Feed algorithm to emphasize updates from friends versus content from Pages.
Later that month, it updated the algorithm again, this time to downplay posts highlighting what a friend Liked or commented — they either show up lower in your News Feed or don’t show up at all.
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm now factors in how much time you’ve spent looking at a post, on top of whether you’ve Liked, commented on or shared it.
Facebook also rolled out this week a new feature that will collect pertinent information about a company or a place like posts from the company’s page, upcoming events, check-ins, etc. and place it at the top of news feed.
Facebook Place Tips: This Week in Social Media
What’s New This Week
Facebook Introduces Place Tips for Business Pages: “Place Tips gather useful information about a business or landmark (like posts from the business’ Page, upcoming events and friends’ recommendations and check-ins) and show it at the top of News Feed to in-store visitors.”
Facebook Rolls Out Facebook Lite: Facebook Lite is “a new version of Facebook for Android that uses less data and works well across all network conditions.”
Publishing on social media can be daunting at times. It requires focus, wisdom and dedication. If you haven’t established a system that lessens the gravity of difficulty in producing social media contents, now is the time to learn it all.
Tom Van Buren, a contributor at ProBlogger.net writes a feature that outlines how advance scheduling can do wonder in our social media marketing programs, and teaches us how exactly to use it.
3 Steps to Saving Time by Writing Social Media Updates in Batches
Scheduling updates in advance solves a number of social media’s most frustrating problems. It gives your routine newfound flexibility, and it can even make you a better blogger. But there’s one hurdle that scheduling alone doesn’t take care of for you: those updates still have to come from somewhere, and that means you have to write them.
Part of the appeal of scheduling is that it stops social media from interrupting your life every time you want to post an update, but without a sound strategy for actually writing those updates, you might just be trading one type of frustration for another. This post will show you how to write social media updates by the batch, so you can more easily grow your fanbase and drive more reliable traffic to your blog.
Think about more than just your own traffic
Social media is an invaluable resource for driving traffic to your own website, but getting carried away can do more harm than good. Forty-five percent of users cite excessive self-promotion as a reason why they would unfollow a brand on social, which means your strategy has to be a lot more refined than just sharing your own links.
Break down your typical updates into categories by type, so there’s variety to the content you share. In addition to posting links to your own blog posts, for example, you might also use social media for posting tips, linking to useful content on other websites, sharing inspirational or funny quotes, and so on. (Quotes and tips in particular are useful for getting shares, which can help you grow your audience.) These categories will guide you through the next step of the batching process: actually writing your updates.
Save time by writing in blocks
If you regularly schedule your social media updates, you might already be writing them in batches – just very small ones. For example, you might set aside time every morning to write and schedule your updates for that day. While this works in theory, it prevents you from developing a big-picture strategy, and it isn’t saving you as much time as it could.
Use the categories you defined to write as many updates you can within a certain time frame (much like the longstanding Pomodoro Technique suggests). Take 20 minutes to write as many updates as you can promoting your various blog posts, then another 20 for tips, and so on. Writing as much as you can within a certain time period gives you the ammunition with which to load your schedule, and it helps you build and maintain creative momentum as you go.
Writing bigger batches like this may seem like a major time commitment, but think of it like making a weekly trip to the grocery store instead of going every day. It may feel like you’re spending more time at the store, but for as long as the groceries last, you’re not wasting time on things like planning meals, making your list, driving back and forth, unloading the car, and so on. Once the work is done, it’s done.
The amount of time these updates last will vary depending on how often you post, but there’s one final step you should take to make sure that you get as much out of them as possible.
Image credit: Featured Image, Facebook Place, Facebook Lite
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