Facebook explains its News Feed post ranking process, rolls out story bumping feature to improve UX

Have a love/hate relationship with your Facebook news feed? Sure, that feed serves up plenty of photos and posts from friends and family that you want to see, but there are also plenty of posts you could do with out, or posts you wish had been assigned greater importance. Facebook knows this, and is constantly tinkering and iterating its news feed post ranking processes to provide the most relevant stories possible to each individual user. To that end, Facebook's rolling out a new feature, called story bumping, to better percolate the stuff you care about to the top of your feed. Story bumping has already been launched on the web, and will be rolling out to mobile in the coming weeks.

Previously, Facebook evaluated the most recent posts on the social network by assigning each post a score based upon a series of factors including: number of likes and comments, the relationship between you and the poster, the type of content, etc. Using those signals, Facebook runs them through a proprietary algorithm to determine a post's score. News feed then displays the posts with the highest score at the top of the feed. However, this method often resulted in relevant posts being relegated below the fold, and those posts would forever be lost in the never-ending social story avalanche. Story bumping provides a way for such posts to be seen by tweaking the recency logic previously used. Instead of picking from the most recent posts, the system now looks for the most recent posts that have not been viewed by the user, so that those older, yet relevant posts get a second crack at showing up in the top of your feed.

Filed under: Internet, Facebook

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Source: Facebook for Business