Facebook provides new explainer on how its News Feed algorithm works
Have you ever wondered how Facebook manages to show relevant content on your News Feed every single time? Well, here is your answer.
Facebook has explained how its News Feed algorithm works on “Let me explain,” episode 3, where it provides a general overview of Facebook’s content ranking system, although it doesn’t give any new insight or tips. Facebook’s content ranking process depends upon individual response as we all know, we all have different News Feeds. Different News Feeds in the sense everybody has different preferences depending upon that and our posts interactions Facebook shows content which it thinks is relevant and valuable to us.
The video explains how Facebook does the process of feed ranking. The process of feed ranking has mainly four elements based on which Facebook categorizes the relevant content because a person has more posts than they could possibly browse in one session.
Facebook categorizes the relevant content because a person has more posts than they could possibly browse in one session.
Those four elements are as follows:
- Inventory: Inventory is the first step in the process. It is all the posts you could potentially see that could include relevant ads based on your activity, all pages you follow and the people you follow, and the content they shared or interacted with.
- Signals: Facebook algorithm then uses various signals to sort content that is relevant to you based on your connection with the person or page sharing the update that includes your interaction with their posts. The algorithm also considers whether the posts you have interacted with are a photo, video, or link post which means if you watch more videos then you will be shown more video updates.
- Predictions: Based on the above signals the algorithm makes predictions about your likely engagement with each post.
- Score – Then finally the algorithm gives a score to each post based on the signals and predictions, The higher the score the more likely it appears on the top of your Facebook feed.
Facebook has further settings which allow you to personally customize your News Feed by using tools like ‘Favourites’ to select the top 30 people you want to see most and also have another option called the ‘Most Recent’ sorting option which will sort your feed chronologically. Further options include, you can directly indicate individual posts by clicking on the top three dots and control posts that aren’t relevant to you, and therefore in the future, similar posts will be scored lower.
This article gives a simple, good overview of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, which will help you to better understand what you see and why you’re seeing those posts in your feed. And this will be very helpful for you if you are looking to optimize your Facebook strategy.
