How Well Does Your News Feed Represent You?
Originally published at linkedin.com on July 8, 2016.
Before we begin touching on the key points of this article, I invite you to take a look at the kind of content with which you interact the most. To ask you to reflect on the posts in which you think you have commented, liked, and shared might be different to the actual content that you are unknowingly reacting to. This is why I suggest looking at your Facebook’s Activity Log.
To access your log, head to your Facebook timeline and a “View Activity Log” button should appear — click it.
For those who do not regularly use Facebook’s activity bookkeeping tool, the activity log will contain every post that you have interacted with. It goes back to the origins of your account, with every like, comment, tag, and share available to you in a reverse chronological order. Once in your personal activity log, make note of recurring names. Are those that appear the most your friends, celebrity pages, or publishers?
If you wanted to see what your behavior was before Facebook first updated their News Feed algorithm, you would need to date back prior to April 21st, 2015, before Facebook announced they would be emphasizing more on friends’ stories to ensure you do not miss their content. A little bit over the year, Facebook released another blog post saying that they will be updating the algorithm once more to give your friends a higher reach over pages and publishers.
“Sorry, Your Business Is Getting Less Reach”
If your job involves reporting metrics from your Facebook page or any other social media platform, this public service announcement will not be pleasant. In fact, publishing companies have already seen a drop on their content’s reach.
Adweek the projected drop in the reach per post.
However, Facebook’s News Feed Engineering Director, Lars Backstrom, gives a gentle nudge to publishers by saying “We encourage Pages [and Publishers] to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends.” The statement just piggybacks the update: if you want to catch the attention of viewers, you need to have content that will get shared by users and their friends. Fair enough, competition always makes for a thriving economy, but costs publishers their organic reach.
My Friends Are Interesting, Kind Of
So yes, you are more likely to log in to Facebook and have a news feed full of your friends’ content. Friends’ content varies from person to person: you might have that one friend who uploads pictures of their baby on a daily basis, the friend who endlessly shares videos of political topics, the friend who never runs out of memes/funny images to share, and finally the friend that is always at parties or traveling. That, however, is what Facebook wants you to see.
As Adam Mosseri, the VP of Product Management for News Feed, posts, the News Feed values entail the following:
- Friends And Family Come First
- Feed Should Inform
- Feed Should Entertain
- A Platform For All Ideas
- Authentic Communication
- You Control Your Experience
- Constant Iteration
The team is said to be hard at work, even with fellow Facebook’s Trending Topics team being recently under fire by conservatives claiming algorithmic bias in the topic rankings, and have said that “the goal of News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them,” and that thanks to their research, it is friends and family whose content is of utmost importance for News Feed.
But is it really?
Why We Interact With Our News Feed
Take another look at your Activity Log. This time differentiate between a friend’s original content (such as their own text post/picture/video) and a post which your friend shared from a page. If your log says you have reacted from posts your friends have shared, then Mosseri was right — publisher’s reach will be okay if they create content that is more likely to be shared.
When I approached a group of friends on the likeliness of them interacting to friends’ shared posts rather than from the publisher pages, their opinions provided me with some interesting insights:
- “I would not like my name to appear under ‘Friends Who Like This page’ on certain publishers’ Timelines, so I will share from what my friends share.”
- “The publisher’s other content does not catch my attention. I will just share that one post that I liked and move on without liking the page.”
- “Sometimes the content shared applies to the friend who shared it. You will see the post and think ‘this is so them’, and tend to react or comment on it.”
Other than your personal image being attached to a brand, the third bullet point struck me as interesting. When sharing content, friends can add commentary on the post. Thus what we see is commentary-on-commentary (your friend’s comment on a page’s post). Thus, the more relatable your content, the more likely it is for a user to join in on the discussion, share your post, and increase your page’s organic reach.
You Control Your Experience, If You Know How To
Luckily, you do not have to strictly abide by the general algorithm put into effect by the News Feed team. Unless you mess around with many of the buttons that Facebook offers — other than the standard react, comment, and share buttons — you might have not noticed that a drop down menu is available in every post.
The second to last News Feed value states that “You Control Your Experience,” and it is perhaps the most important value. If you are selective in your Facebook experience (which you should be), Facebook offers various options to hide the posts which you would rather avoid from seeing either via News Feed or Timeline in such drop down menu.
In addition to hiding posts, you can also choose to favor certain friends and pages/publishers. In my example below, I avidly follow publishers like Mashable and Adweek to stay up-to-date on social media and tech news, thus their posts, video, and pictures will be prioritized in my News Feed.
Take The Time: Make It Your News Feed
Much like the News Feed team, all I can recommend is that you take advantage of the tools that are currently available. Hide the posts you do not want to see, unfollow the sources you deem irrelevant, and chose to “See First” those most important to you. Customizing your News Feed could tailor for a new experience: perhaps Facebook will become your source of entertainment, news, or family events. Emily Neuberger, however, does a great job at noting the source imbalance if you do not customize your feed.
“How can we have a conversation if we can’t even hear other voices?”
-Emily Neuberger, The Content Strategist
Many of the other social media platforms have tailored feeds to their users based on their customization: Twitter’s “ What You Might Like” and Instagram’s latest news feed algorithm update.What makes up your activity log? Do you find yourself customizing your experience — unfollowing friends/pages to enhance your News Feed? Comment below on ways you have tailored your News Feed to provide better content.
Got any thoughts to add? Tweet me @juliangumbo or comment below!
Julian Gamboa is a UC Berkeley graduate with a focus on marketing. Julian was selected as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Marketing and #Social Media (2017) and a Course Instructor of the marketing and digital publishing course Digital Marketing Today at the Haas School of Business. He is also the founder of Digiviewpoint, a millennial publishing account.
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