Facebook: Here's How Your News Feed Works

Your Facebook News Feed is a hodgepodge of information: some of it you love, some of it you hate, and some of it may just make you scratch your head. The average user's News Feed has around 1,500 possible stories filtered through per day, according to Lars Backstrom, engineering manager for Facebook's News Feed ranking. But only 20% of them actually make your feed.

So how does Facebook determine which 20% you see?

The social network attempted to answer that question at a special event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters on Tuesday, explaining how the system has moved from manual knob-turning during the feed's early days (they used to increase or decrease the number of photos or status updates you'd see based on anecdotal feedback from users) to the systematic algorithm that determines what you see today.

Facebook reiterated its oft-stated goal: to give users a "customized newspaper" highlighting the stories it assumes users will find most interesting. The process assigns each new story a score, placing the highest scoring stories at the top of the feed.

Scores are determined using a number of factors, such as the relationship you have with the user who posted it, the number of comments, the number of shares, and the number of likes that the story has accumulated.

Previously, each time a user refreshed their feed, new stories automatically moved to the top of the feed — even if they had a lower score than stories previously displayed. A change in the ranking process now enables older stories (stories that may have been posted earlier in the day but the user never actually scrolled through) to join the "new" stories at the top of your feed.

The hope is that relevant posts that may not have been at the top of your feed during your first scan, can still resurface and won't be buried by new, less relevant content.

The change has been implemented on Facebook's web version, but it's still being rolled out on mobile devices, says Backstrom. This new strategy has created an uptick in user engagement, he adds. A recent study by Facebook found that this new ranking system led to a 13% increase in stories read, and a 5% increase in interactions (Likes, shares, comments).

Another change to the algorithm looks at a user’s last 50 interactions, putting a higher priority on the friends or pages they’ve interacted with most recently. This change is not yet rolled out over all devices, says Backstrom.

Backstrom says the new “story bumping” feature does not affect ads on News Feed, confirming the ad system is completely different than the one determining News Feed’s user-created content. It is still common for ads to show up on your news feed over multiple days if they are relevant.

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

3 Ways to Find Great Content to Share on Twitter

Twitter is all about sharing. It started with sharing "what you were feeling" at a specific point in time and it has evolved into a platform where everybody seems to share everything from the mundane to the exciting. Even pictures, videos and audio files.

If you are a big company. You can't tweet just about anything. You can't tweet about how much you loved that thing your favourite singer wore on that event. You have to share something relevant to your followers.
Although it is quite obvious that we should create new and informative content for your followers. You should also remember that curating content (which should also be relevant and informative) is equally important.

So how can you find good content to share on your feed? Here are some steps you can take to reach that goal.

#1: Know your audience
The first step is pretty simple and self explanatory. In order for you to find what you can give to your audience, you have to first know what they want. There will always be a common interest between you and your followers and you have find that out in order to provide something relevant to them. There are a lot of ways to do this but sometimes the simplest "What do you want me to tweet about?" question is good enough for some.

#2: Use tools
You don't have to do everything manually. Good for us, there are already hundreds of tools out there we can use to curate content. What you need is an excellent aggregation tool to collate all content for you. There are a hundred tools out there for you and you need to find that perfect fit for you. Remember that some functions may be present in some while others might be better on one thing compared to the others.

#3: Analyze Data
If there is one very important step you should not forget then it will be with regards to data analysis. Remember that you are pretty much checking what your followers love and which posts get more engagement from them. You should take note which articles get more retweets, favorites and clicks. You should gather these articles and try to see what separates them from the others. Is it the timing? The topic? The author? After you realize what makes it different, capitalize on that and dominate.

The Internet will never run out of good content to curate. It will never run out of new ideas to be shared. It will never ever run out of people hungry for knowledge. Use this to your advantage and you will get yourself a very good following on Twitter.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7912342