How Facebook Newsfeed work and how it can impact the organic reach of your posts

Have you ever wondered how the content on your Facebook news feed is prioritized? Why do you see local news on the last bottom and the finesse wedding picture of your best friend on the top? Why is it? Do FB bots or human reviewers know what matters to you the most? That’s a question that even the FB experts would find it tough to answer in short.

Much like Google search results, FB’s news feed is made up of the content such as posts, and videos posted by your family, friends, social groups, personal or public pages of private organizations, advertising or news agencies. Each of the posts are organized on the basis of several factors in your newsfeed.

Content Distribution on Your FB News Feed

Because Facebook promotes the engagement between the users, friends, families, acquaintances online, it automatically tailors your newsfeed with the recent or popular posts shared by those. While the business content or paid ads are shown randomly by keywords, and paid advertisements.

Till 2017, Facebook used to create newsfeed as per the pattern shown below :

With Facebook’s newsfeed update rolled out in January this year, the paid or public content is demoted in news feed and the other posts from users’ likes, interest and friends is shown more. This would have direct impact on the organic reach of your promotional campaign. You might have to invest a lot in the paid campaigns or creating the content that appeals to the users, but it might not even reach to the users with this update. Therefore, ranking on the Facebook news feed of your prospective leads, the situation is tough!

Why such massive change?

It is inferred from the Facebook’s press releases, and official announcements, news feed works hard only with a single aim- bring people closer! But as a business, FB wants you to become its regular on repeat user! You would read content, watch videos, like the pictures, exchange words with the people across the world and bring a stronger community in the virtual FB world.

For past two-three years, FB has been flooded by the prosperous businesses and brands which resulted in a decline in the number of users. People started becoming obnoxious with the nagging paid ads, corporate videos, and promotional contents hitting their news feed every minute. That’s the reason why FB came out with this newsfeed update.

3 Principles of News Feed Display:

Becoming Eligible: Every post created by the users on FB is indexed and stored in FB’s database. And whenever a user logs in to his account, the posts, stories, and content matching his interest are extracted from the database and displayed to him in his newsfeed. The users’ interest, friendlist, follower, viewership, and popularity fall under the eligibility criteria in news feed. Whenever your friend logs in to the account, FB extracts the posts from his friends on the basis of user’s interest, relevance, etc.

Winning the Candidature: If you have 200 friends, they might have created 400 posts altogether, so how does the FB rank the stories or posts in your newsfeed? Which post should be given the popularity depends on the freshness, popularity, and usefulness for the user. If your FB page or profile is marked as “see first” by 100 followers, then everytime you create post, yours will be on the top of their news feed.

Think of how SEO works! With the use of keywords, you attract the crawlers to index your website. Similarly, the keywords or hashtags created by the users as interest areas, university, school, work-place, food courts, checked-in places, liked pages, kind of posts you’ve liked many times, and other such information is cached by FB to rank the content you post in the users’ news feed.

The decisive Brain: FB determines which particular post or story from the user might interest you by predicting your previous behaviour and engagement with various content type. Analyze your personal Facebook account and business page, you would find how differently the news feed is tailored. Whose posts you like and comment on, whose profile you check on continuous basis and which do you not even click on, Facebook tracks everything for a better user experience. From now, if you are up to promote your business on Facebook without acting as intruder or obnoxious, you must create relevant content that people engage with.

Covert Strategies To Increase Organic Reach of Your Posts on Facebook News Feed

• From now, the videos that people watch, like and share by going directly the page lay on the top 10 posts in users’ news feed.
  Therefore, you must create video along with the distribution strategy. Think which particular population type would like to see what kind of videos related to your business. Apart from the views, likes, and shares, your video must drive conversations amongst the masses. Make them engaging such as ask for their opinions, talk about something controversial or welcome people of all ideologies.

• Social interactions, as well as the good readership, is what Facebook wants. So, local news from trusted sources is prioritized.
  Give room for social interactions and build your readership stronger every time by sharing the local news and high-quality information. But how you know what news you have been sharing or posting? Make sure the source of your news is trustworthy because FB hates spammers and rumours. For this, you must narrow down your audience by defining the local target area. Let’s say you want clients from publishing industry in Stanford, U.S., try to check what’s happening in and around Stanford. People like to know what’s happening around them and in their industry. You may choose to write short news articles in precise with a suitable call-to-action, and the job is done well.

• Track & increase your community score on Facebook to become a reputed organization.
  By community score, Facebook and we mean that your target community should easily identify and trust you! Reputation and popularity is the key to stand successful on Facebook. As the recent press release from Facebook, your target community or audience can be randomly surveyed about you as an organization and your feed as reliable. In either case, branding is essential. Therefore, work more on your branding but not with the irrelevant or excessively hefty paid ads. Make the content user-friendly and relevant if you want your organic reach unaffected by this Facebook news feed update.