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What Did Facebook Announce, and How Does

It Impact My Strategy?August 6, 2013

Overall the algorithm still works mostly the same, with the exception

of a few improvements.

We’ll explain each change and what you can do about it to

stay on top of your strategy.

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What Happened?

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Facebook recently held a small gathering to explain their latest changes to the news feed.

A few key takeaways:• There is still an algorithm determining the news feed

• New Story Bumping Signal

• New Last Actor Signal

• Future New Chronological by Actor Signal

• There will not be a purely chronological change

Story Bumping Signal

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Story Bumping is a new Organic Ranking factor. Each visit, Facebook

looks at all of the new content and creates corresponding scores. A

Post decays on average after about 3 hours because of Time Decay.

Therefore most people’s news feeds lack old content.

With Story Bumping, objects with high EdgeRank (and assumably

now very low values of Time Decay) can be bumped into your feed if

you “missed the update”. This update to the EdgeRank algorithm

ultimately decreases the effect of Time Decay.

Story Bumping Signal

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How To Take Advantage of Story Bumping

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We believe that Post Lifetimes will now have a larger variance. Posts

that are inherently good will most likely be able to pick up

engagement well past the typical 3 hour average we’ve seen in the

past. However, posts that are inherently bad will most likely die a

quicker news feed death.

It will now be more important to know how quickly a post is likely to

die. If the post seems destined for a quick death, the next window of

opportunity is much sooner than you may typically expect. We’ll be

studying this in the future.

Last Actor Signal

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Facebook keeps track of who a user has made the

last 50 interactions with. People & Pages that have

been interacted with these last 50 interactions, will

receive a small bump in value (Affinity).

Ultimately, these interactions are now having a

stronger influence into the Affinity component.

How To Take Advantage of Last Actor?

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For Pages, it is ideal to be one of those last 50

interactions to receive that bump. For some brands,

this will simply mean delivering excellent content at

the right intervals (optimal post frequencies). Some

brands will be able to significantly increase their post

frequencies, and this may aide the likelihood of being

included as one of the Last Actor’s actions.

Chronological by Actor Signal

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Facebook has not rolled this out. Facebook is considering rolling it out in the near future, once they’ve optimized a few things. Initial results have not been as successful as they would have liked.

Facebook attempted to make a Chronological By Actor tweak to the feed. This will help with understanding real time content. This change essentially removes Time Decay from the algorithm, while increasing the value of the Last Actor signal, therefore giving the user the ability to view interesting content in a chronological listing.

How To Take Advantage of Chronological by Actor

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There is nothing to do but to wait until this is rolled out. This may or may not affect Pages.

Is EdgeRank Dead?

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Facebook no longer uses the word internally, however they apparently refer to it as the “algorithm for the news feed”. Not quite as catchy or easy off the tongue, as EdgeRank.

EdgeRank still seems to be the most popular unofficial term around, and we’ll be the first to let you know if that changes.

Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager of News Feed rankings at Facebook, said that “the three primary EdgeRank factors — Affinity, Weight and Time Decay — are still important pieces of what is today a much more complicated News Feed ranking algorithm.”

Facebook does not have an official name for the algorithm.

Read more on our blog!

edgerankchecker.com/blog

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