Whether you believe it or not, the quality of the content you get on your Facebook timeline is changing, for a lot of people, it might be for the better and for some, it’s getting worse.
Adam Mosseri, the Vice President for News Feed at Facebook broke down the social website’s content ranking algorithm during the 2017’s F8 Summit.
He described what your content is worth, how and which kind of people will see it.
He initially explained what an algorithm is. By his definition, it is “a formula or a set of steps for solving a particular problem”. After the definition, he presented a real-world problem and illustrated it with a series of steps and how it works. His example was related to an order in a restaurant.
To solve this, he basically broke it down into 4 major steps.
Inventory
The first step when it comes to providing content to user is inventory bit. The algorithm takes a look at all the things which are present on your newsfeed. The Facebook algorithm looks at the stories posted by your Facebook friends and by the pages that you follow and like.
This step is important in the completion as it tells Facebook what you like, and which kind of content you need.
Signals
After having an in-depth look at your feed, the algorithm tries to make a decision about how interested you may be with certain content and stories. This idea of “signals” is essentially the mastermind behind the process.
Reviewing over a hundred thousand signals, Facebook ranks your content by variables, including the person who posts the story, what device they are on and what time it is. There is even consideration to the bandwidth the user has!
Predictions
By using the signals provided by your newsfeed, the algorithm takes guesses as to what kind of content you may be interested in. These predictions are used to know the output of a certain probability. This probability basically is whether or not a story will be interesting and relevant for a user.
Because of these predictions, there are determinations how likely you will be to share, comment and like certain posts and stories.
Score
Remember, there are always a few predications which the algorithm makes which are just “educated” guesses that it takes after reviewing your Facebook feed and creates a “relevance score”. This is basically a number that determines how interested a user might be on a story.
Adam also heavily pointed it out that Facebook does NOT know what you’re actually interested in; it takes hints from your timeline and makes guesses based off of it.
In a nutshell, this new algorithm allows users to have a much more customized experience; even though this process is determined on facts and figures as determined by machines, it definitely helps enhance the browsing experience of most people.
So now what?
If you’re operating a business page, you need to know what content gets engagement, right? I’d like to invite you to watch my free webinar titled “Power Engagement Marketing”, where I show you seven strategies for creating engagement on your Page. If you stay until the end of the webinar you’ll get all of my slides, two tutorial videos showing how to create custom graphics and a video by my social media manager which shows you how to schedule (and analyze) your Facebook posts.