Facebook has announced it has tinkered with its News Feed feature again, thanks to a new ranking algorithm that the company claims will help to put the spotlight on stories that users might want to read if they missed them the first time.
In a blog post, Facebook states that every time an average user checks out his or her News Feed, there are 1,500 potential posts from their friends and pages that could be displayed. Facebook claims that when the News Feed is set up with unranked posts in chronological order, the number of stories users read goes down, along with their numbers of likes and comments.
Today, the Facebook webpage has launched the new ranking algorithm for the News Feed section. The company says the algorithm takes into account several factors from each Facebook user. The blog states, "Now organic stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top of News Feed if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments."
Prior to this change, Facebook claimed that its users only read 57 percent of the posts in their News Feed. In testing with this new algorithm, the company claims that percentage jumped up to 70 percent.
It will be interesting to see if this new change will be welcomed by the over one billion Facebook subscribers. In 2011, the company made changes that pushed up what it called "important" stories to the top of the News Feed. The result was a massive backlash against the alterations, with many users preferring the chronological pattern. Facebook later added the "most recent" option to the News Feed to preserve the previous version.
Source: Facebook | Image via Facebook