The New Facebook News Feed Algorithm

Aug 7, 2013

On your Facebook News feed you see lots of information. Some of the information you care about and other information you choose to ignore. According to Lars Backstrom, Engineering Manager for Facebook’s News Feed Ranking, “The average user’s Facebook News Feed has around 1,500 stories throughout the day.” The amount of stories you actually see is around 20%.

Facebook’s goal for the News Feed is to give you an experience similar to a newspaper, so you can read stories that concern you. They want to highlight the stories that they feel users will enjoy the most. Their process of doing this involves assigning a score to each story and the stories with the highest score go to the top.

Scoring Factors:

  • Relationship with the User
  • Number of Comments
  • Number of Likes
  • Number of Shares

The Changes:

  • “Story Bumping” – Older stories that were posted earlier in the day that may have not been seen will join the new stories at the top of your feed when you refresh your page. Facebook is hoping to increase user engagement by not hiding less relevant content.
  • The algorithm also looks at the last 50 interactions and will give the story a higher importance rating on the pages and friends you’ve interacted with recently.

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