Have you been wondering recently why considering you have so many ‘friends’ on Facebook, only 15-20 show up in your news feed? This isn’t down to them suddenly stopping using Facebook- no not at all. This is actually down to Facebook changing settings on users’ pages and something which could cause devastating effects for businesses, especially for those looking to market, promote or interact through Facebook.
There are now two settings on your Facebook news feed: ‘Most Recent’ which shows most of the content published by your ‘friends’ in chronological order, and ‘Top News’ which filters based on Edgerank.
High Edgerank friend and fan pages are more likely to show up in your ‘Top News’ stream, whilst users with low Edgerank may not even show up in your ‘Most Recent’. Due to ‘Top News’ being the default setting for most users, unless this is manually changed by the user, it is quite possible that many ‘friend’ updates are never seen.
So the first thing that I would suggest for you do is to change these settings. To do this, follow these instructions:
– Go to ‘home’
– At the top of the newsfeed you have 2 options- ‘Top News’ and ‘Most Recent’
– Click on ‘Most Recent’
– Then click on the drop down menu for ‘Most Recent’ and click on ‘Edit Options’
– In the ‘Show posts from’ section, click on ‘All of your friends and pages’
– Click ‘Save’
This now enables you to see all of your possible ‘friend’ updates, however, unless your ‘friends’ have gone through this same process, it is unlikely that they will be able to see all of their ‘friends’ updates meaning potentially a loss of social media interaction for businesses.
Facebook analyses everything published such as status updates, links, photos, videos as ‘objects’. Every object receives a ranking (Edgerank) and this stipulates where and if it appears in your newsfeed. Objects with higher Edgerank appear in your ‘Top News’ feed, where objects with low Edgerank will not, and may not even appear in your ‘Most Recent’ news feed at all.
Facebook’s Edgerank is based on 3 factors:
– Affinity or the relationship between the creator & user. Regular interaction between particular users increases affinity and therefore increased Edgerank.
– Interaction with the object such as likes and comments. The more effort made, the more likely you are to appear in someone’s newsfeed.
– Timeliness. New and up to date objects are given priority.
Every object is scored based on the individual Facebook user and the more interaction that takes place between users, the more likely that content is to appear in newsfeeds. Tips on how you can increase the likelihood of appearing in newsfeeds are shown below:
– Publish objects that encourage interaction
– Create a forum
– Make the most of photos and videos
– Share links
– Keep it fresh
– Ask users to share
Follow these tips, change your Facebook settings and spread the word, as the more people that know about these changes, the more likely you are to appear on Facebook, meaning more social media awareness about your business, brand or yourself.