Connecting on Facebook: Making News Feed Work for Brands

Picture the scene: you’ve just added your 1,000th friend on Facebook and you're celebrating your unquestionable popularity. But pause a moment. One of your 1,000 friends, a guy you knew in primary school for about a week (now living in Sydney), is going to a bar night 10,553 miles away. Did you really need to know this?

I think you, like me, would say "Well, maybe not" to that question. Enter Facebook’s news feed algorithm.

The algorithm

Facebook’s news feed algorithm is designed to show you content that’s relevant. It’s the result of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision that Facebook should show the stories that actually matter to you - or in his own words:

Our goal [with Facebook] is to build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world. […] Whether that’s global news through pages you might be following or things that are very personal to you like updates about your friends.¹

Mechanics

Although the exact methods are undisclosed, the algorithm uses a range of signals to determine relevance for a user. Some of the primary signals are described in Facebook’s “How news feed Works” help article, but we can infer others by observation.² Numerous authors have written up their findings and they are a good guide to build a better picture of what Facebook takes as positive or negative signals.³ Here are a few (of the many) algorithm variables to bear in mind:

1. Your audience’s activity on Facebook (e.g. their likes, shares, comments, and posts);
2. Your audience’s friends and their activity;
3. The likes, comments, and shares on a post by connected friends in your audience;
4. How much your audience members have interacted with posts of a particular type in the past;
5. The negative feedback given to a post.

Facebook also ranks some types of status updates higher than others. Text-based updates, for instance, are ranked lower than photos and videos for pages, but not people.⁴ This type of content prioritisation is likely to continue as Facebook moves toward a platform where people can share not just recent photos or videos, but content in real time as well as fully immersive scenes and eventually virtual or augmented reality.¹

Consequences

Zuckerberg’s vision of curating the perfect selection of stories for any given user is a valuable proposition. In reality, this vision translates to around 20% of all updates being visible in a typical person's news feed.⁴ (A figure backed up by a Washington Post journalist who discovered on average he saw only 22% of friends’ and liked pages’ new posts).⁵

This creates a conflict for brands, organisations, and public figures using Facebook to communicate with their audience as business interests contend with personal relevance.

There’s this inherent conflict in the system which is: are we trying to optimize news feed to give each person the best experience? Or are we trying to help businesses just reach as many people as possible? In every decision we make we optimize for the first.¹

What this means for brand pages

Where does this leave us then, when the pages we manage are passively being selected against and our status updates aren’t being seen? There are two answers. The first is to promote and expend budget to increase reach – an unsustainable solution if continuously employed over the long term. The other answer is to focus on the content.

If you’re a business owner […] I would focus on trying to publish really good content that’s going to be compelling to your customers and the people who are following you.¹

So how do we define really good and compelling content? Because of the variety of an audience’s interests, it’s hard to nail down at the best of times, but we’ve compiled a list of best practices to get started:

Relevant

Create or share content that will be relevant to the person reading it. Find out their interests, create a persona, or do anything that will enable you to think, feel, and react as they do and give them stories that will resonate.

Timely

Content that’s related to a piece of current or breaking news, trending topic, or a time-sensitive report. Facebook, like Google, prioritises the first posts that relate a topic. So if you see something new that you can talk about, react.

Stories

Content that does the hard sell, e.g. “Buy Now”, “Win…” and other call-to-actions, are a no-no and will actively reduce your reach as Facebook wants brands or public figures to pay to promote sales-heavy posts. Product promotions need to be focussed on the benefits: how they’ve genuinely helped someone; how they have innovated to bring change; or simply a customer story instead of the slick promotional copy.

Entertaining, Informative, Inspiring, and Moving

Original comedy, a novel angle on the news, thoughtful long-form prose, or an emotionally charged story can generate interest, excitement, and engagement sparking likes, shares, and comments admins can respond to which in turn can lead to further engagement.

What we think

Facebook is about connections and the news feed strives to deliver the right stories at the right time to its users. Although finding and creating great stories is a challenge, it's what delivers results. High profile or low, you can only expect to reach growing proportions of your audience by delivering compelling stories, great photos, or interesting videos.

Facebook will enable you to succeed if your content is relevant, informative, inspiring, or any of these other positive-yet-indefinable words. But if you only share clickbait, "buy now" promotional posts, and low quality images, expect your reach to suffer however many thousands of likes you have.

More information and helpful reading

See below for our sources and if you've got any thoughts to add, we'd love to hear them. Leave us a comment below or if you want to learn more about connecting with your audience and growing your community, drop us a line at .

Edit 24.04.2015:

So just after we shared this update Facebook has announced a news feed change based on user feedback - full results can be seen here but the basic details are:

1. If you don't have many friends and only follow a few pages, you'll see more individual stories
2. Another update to increase the visibility of important updates from friends and pages
3. Reducing the quantity of interaction stories (e.g. your friend commented on X's post) as actual users ranked these very low.

These effects will vary depending on the audience of your page but points 2 and 3 are important changes. Point 2 serves to further highlight the need of providing useful or relevant content, while point 3 could result in reduced virality as engagements may not result in increased exposure and new interactions.