New Facebook: Changes, Challenges and Solutions (Hybrid newsfeed)

Since the latest Facebook update we have received a lot of questions on how it is possible that impressions on certain posts have dropped significantly and why some posts didn’t show up at user’s wall at all. Of course we have done our research and want to give you a short update about our latest findings. (These findings have been supported and confirmed by Facebook engineers as well)

Changes in Facebook

The two most important changes that have been done in recent updates are the way status updates in the Newsfeeds are shown and the Ticker.
Before the recent update, Facebook separated Top News (based on EdgeRank) and Recent (in chronologic order). This has changed into one “hybride” flow with messages. When you open your newsfeed, the first messages you’ll see are “top stories”, which are based on the EdgeRank. When you scroll down you’ll find your other messages in chronological order. Facebook stores your messages until you login and then decides which messages are relevant for you based on the EdgeRanker.

To make sure you don’t miss any posts while you are using Facebook, they have introduced the Ticker. This is a column on the right-side of your screen which shows the real-time updates of your friends. In this Ticker you are able to respond to these updates directly. In the app settings in Facebook, users are able to select which updates they want to see in the Ticker.

 

What our observations found

We found a couple of challenging occurrences:

1. Some status updates have a great impression & engagement performance vs. status updates which only have 10% of this top performance
2. Recent stories doesn’t necessarily contain all messages
3. The hybrid newsfeed doesn’t always show updates chronologically

Additionally Edgerankchecker.com found:

1. Average impressions per update have dropped by 22%
2. Average engagement has gone up by approx. 15%

Most researchers came up with multiple hypothesis about this effect:

1. 3^rd Party applications like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck but also enterprise level systems like Buddy, MI, Syncapse etc are being penalized by Facebook. A common hypothesis is that Facebook wants to discourage the use of these systems. It is being said that Facebook want’s to encourage users to visit their physical website instead.
2. Facebook “collapses” 3^rd party application posts. The common “See 8 more posts from Hootsuite”.
3. High chance that a status update is being scheduled. And because of this reason it wouldn’t act on the actual interests of the Page’s interest.
4. The content being published to Facebook is of low quality and therefore ending up with a lower Edgerank score. Stuff like subjects of interest, post length, update timing, receiving fan profile, message density among other things would influence this score.

Debunking the myths

Every big change leads to a lot of discussions. In the past this was about Google’s SEO algorithms and nowadays the discussion is about Facebook Content Optimalization (short FCO). But during these discussions there is something most of us tend to forget and that’s simply put common sense. So together with common sense, objective research and talks with Facebook engineers we came to the following conclusions:

1. DEBUNKED 3^rd party applications: Facebook is not penalizing external applications. What we see instead is bad configuration on the side of these application but also possible bugs on Facebook ‘s side. And here is why:
   1. Yes, Facebook is collapsing updates from the same application origin. But Facebook has been doing this for many months already. It activates as soon as an application sends more than a certain amount of messages within a fixed timeframe. This simply means that if you send an update through Hootsuite for your page and friends of my who use the same application as well, the posts from Hootsuite will be collapsed into one single post. Effectively killing your view rate. For this reason we use white label publishers for all our clients and advise them on their message density.
   2. Facebook confirmed that it is even favouring 3^rd party applications since it improves the experience of Facebook for a large group of both companies and personal users. It effectively decreases the load on their own systems and it helps companies get more insights and possibilities then they would otherwise be able to offer through the means of their own development roadmap.
2. CONFIRMED Quality of published content: It’s widely known that Facebook was already analysing the performance of your content and cross referencing it with your Page’s fans. This has indeed gotten tighter with the introduction of the hybrid stream. For some pages this meant that their posts weren’t shown at all anymore for a time, while others didn’t notice any difference. This all has to do with the fact that it’s no longer guaranteed that your post will even show up in the recent messages if Facebook thinks that the content is not relevant for it’s users. A simple test proved that if you would engage a couple of times with this new and “invisible” content of a bad performing page, future posts suddenly started showing up in the hybrid feed.
3. DEBUNKED Scheduled updates: this one is of course closely related to the previous point. If the update is not relevant enough, it won’t show up regardless where it was sent from. We’ve tested this on all clients and have seen little to no difference between the performances of a scheduled or normal update.

We hope that above information will help you in further improving your social enagement!