Facebook algorithm!

Social media users are bombarded by excessive media messages every day – in a study by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) showed that on average, if users were to consume all the data delivered to them, it would take at least 15 hours! Facebook is one of the online platforms that people spend a significant amount of time each day swiping their thumbs through their newsfeed – consuming posts from friends, family, businesses and news alike. With so many possible combinations of messages to see, who dictates what shows up on a person’s newsfeed?

It’s no surprise that Facebook has a group of computer gurus that changes the algorithm, which made of thousands of metrics that decides what users would be most interested to see. Let’s take a look at how the consumption of news has changed. 30% of American adults receive their news through Facebook according to Pew Research Center. What is more interesting is that people no longer search for whole editions of the newspaper or magazine, they instead look for individual pieces. An interesting question that was posed in the article How Facebook is Changing the Way its Users Consumer Journalism is “Are you creating content for the way that content is consumed in this environment [digital world]?”

Is your content appropriate for the environment?

Businesses have realized that moving online means that different types of customization needs to occur when taking their game online. Using the journalism example again, people may be reading on their mobile phone, or on their iPad, and the experience on each device is altered. News publications used to have stories that were not particularly interesting but because a “filler” was needed, these stories were included. However, this will not happen online, because it will detriment the company’s exposure on Facebook. This is due to the metric of “higher-quality content” that has been added to the Facebook algorithm. According to the article, viral sites such as Upworthy and Elite Daily were impacted negatively when this new algorithm first came out.

It is essential for businesses to understand the metrics that they are being rated on when posting through Facebook, and as mentioned in class, just having ONE post that a viewer might pin as “unfollow” will harm future posts’ reach. Stay tuned to my next article regarding more Facebook tips!