For psychologists, “selective attention” is the process by which we filter out unnecessary stimuli, enabling us to make sense of the world.
Facebook’s algorithms have a similar effect: they filter our news feeds, ensuring that we don’t see every story. With the average user having around 1500 stories that could be shown in their news feed on every visit, this prevents our feeds from becoming crowded and unwieldy. The latest change to this algorithm is Story Bumping, which allows stories that are getting more engagement (more likes, comments and shares) to be bumped up in the news feed.
Whilst these “interventions” by Facebook to sort and select the best content may improve users’ overall experience, you may be wondering how these changes will affect your marketing? Is this good or bad for business.
Who Sees What?
Now, let’s look at how News Feed selects what gets shown, selecting roughly 300 from 1500 possible posts. The selection criteria are as follows:
- How often you interact with the friend, Page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
- The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
- How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past
- Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post.
What is Story Bumping?
The Story Bump shows you posts you may not have seen when they were first published.
Before bumping, it was difficult for users to scroll through and discover older content. Now, instead of finding all the new stories at the top of your News Feed, stories that are new to you are at the top. For example, say you log in at lunchtime and scroll through 50 posts before logging out, missing the 51st post. Four hours later, you check Facebook and that unread story is at the top of your news feed, even though it’s four hours old.
Not all stories will be bumped to the top, however, only those new stories, even the older ones, that are relevant to you and unseen, will be bumped to the top.
Now this IS good news for small businesses as it gives your posts a second chance to be seen. With around only a two-hour window for a post to get 75% of its maximum reach, Bumping increases the chances of engagement with your content.
Facebook has already tested this among 7,000 daily active users in July. With Story Bumping in place for these users, there was an 8% increase in stories seen from friends, an 8% increase in stories seen from pages, and a jump from 57 to 70% in overall stories read.
Engagement is Everything.
The algorithms continue to develop, but nothing changes the fact that, with any social media campaign, quality of content is key. If anything, Story Bumping means that you’ll have to work a bit harder in this respect, for the more informative, educational and compelling your content, the more likely it will be interacted with, making it more likely to be bumped to the top.
Call to Action
With the entire Facebook algorithm now based on how many people liked, shared or commented on your post, it’s a good idea to include a “call to action” in some of your posts, that is, invite your fans to interact with your post with requests such as “tell us”, “please share” etc. Whilst too much of this may put people off, used sparingly, these methods are extremely effective at getting people to interact.
So, it seems at the moment that Story bumping is more of a dream than a nightmare for small businesses, but only for those who understand the importance of publishing high quality, interesting material that sets them apart as a valuable source of information to their readers.
If you are unsure how to maximise facebook for business then why not book a ‘Discovery session‘ or facebook training. We offer 121 support and advice and make a great cuppa too!
