Facebook marketing is getting more and more rewarding as Facebook works tirelessly to improve their services.
Recently, one of my mentors whose Page has good engagement was invited by Facebook to discuss how her experience could help improve Facebook ads. Also, in response to customers’ request, Facebook has started blogging about updates which they make to their services. The latest is about the algorithm that determines which stories appear first in the Facebook News Feed.
With so many stories being posted to Facebook every day, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if Facebook displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information. When posts are shown in chronological order, the number of stories people read as well as the likes and comments they make, decrease.
According to Facebook, the goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them. Ideally, News Feed is meant to show all the posts people want to see in the order they want to read them. This is being referred to as ‘Story Bump’ and is good news for Facebook marketers for several reasons. In tests done by Facebook, story bump has brought an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on stories posted by pages.
News Feed will know which of the many stories to show because Facebook lets people decide who and what to connect with, and also listen to feedback. When a user ‘likes’ something, that tells News Feed that the person wants to see more of it; when they ‘hide’ something, that tells News Feed to display less of that content in the future. This allows Facebook to prioritize an average of 300 stories out of the potential 1,500 stories each person sees each day.
To make sure you see posts from certain people or pages, you’ll need to create a ‘Facebook Interest List’. Just as in Twitter marketing, people create lists to keep track of the people they find most interesting on Facebook.
For effective social media marketing, you can also encourage your fans to create interest lists that include your page. They get notifications about your page by clicking on the Liked button under the right side of your cover photo and selecting 'Get Notifications'. This is where you can add the page to interest lists.
A recent study showed that it only takes 2 hours and 30 minutes for a post to get 75% of its total impressions and less than 2 hours to get 75% of its maximum reach. So you have a very short window of time to get engagement. However, Story Bumping lets your story jump back up in the news feed if it gets good engagement.
Social media marketing experts agree that Story Bumping is about engagement; for it to work for any Page owner, you must post good content that will engage readers. If your post is engaging, Facebook will bump it to the top of the News Feed. So, be remarkable, be interesting, give useful content, and don’t be boring.