The Interworking of the Facebook New Feed

Have you ever wondered how facebook decides what goes on your news feed? Is everything that someone posts on your account? Turns out the answer is no. Not all of your friends activities pop up on your newsfeed because there is a limited amount that they can post on your news feed per day because there isn’t enough room to post everything, plain and simple. The problem is that the competition for news feed space is getting more and competitive, as there is more traffic on facebook. Last year, the number of pages that people “liked” went up by over 50%.

So as traffic increases, facebook makes decisions about how to filter what they are going to put on your news feed, but they don’t usually communicate this to their customers, which as resulted in some criticism of the social media giant. This is especially upsetting to small businesses that have encouraged fans/consumers to “like” their page and who pay for facebook ads only to have their reach and advertising power filtered, seemingly randomly, by facebook. Facebook claims that with the amount of likes and friends that people have, the posts flooding into their news feed could be up to 15,000 per day. To help readers handle this, they do not treat each post equally and therefore filter some out. Facebook aims to show the most engaging posts to the viewer. It is in their best interest to keep the viewer entertained, so they don’t want to fill your news feed with things you do not want to see.

To filter your news feed, facebook uses an algorithm, known as EdgeRank. This analyzes relevance to the users using over 100,000 different indicators of importance. Some of the most powerful factors are how popular a post is (how many likes), how popular past posts have been by the same creator, what kind of post it is (photo, status update, video, etc.), and how recently it was posted. It comes down to the more successful and popular you are on facebook the more you earn space on friend’s news feeds. In some ways it feels like going back to high school.







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