New Facebook Feed Rewards Engagement

Facebook users, whether utilised for personal or for internet marketing purposes, have been faced with a number of changes to the social network over the last few months.  

One of the most obvious to even casual users is the change to the feed page; often the first page users see when they access the service.  The new layout, dubbed the "hybrid feed", combines the old "most recent" and "top stories" feeds, with a new way of prioritising which stories users see at the top; users are more likely to see content from people they have already interacted with, for example. 

It has only been running for a few weeks, but the new way of displaying the feeds would appear to already be having some interesting impacts on user's interaction with news stories and friends' posts, according to an early study from software company EdgeRank.  

This early data, gleaned from data from over 3,500 Facebook pages over two separate fortnightly periods, seems to suggest that whilst post impressions are down markedly - by an average of 25% - interaction with the posts was up, both in terms of likes (up nearly 10%) and comments (up 21%).  The new feed creates a virtual circle; content that is interacted with more is pushed up the feed, sustaining interesting and engaging posts more, whilst pushing down less engaging ones.  

Bearing in mind this is early, limited data, what does this mean? Well, if sustained, it means that the pressure is on even more to create interesting content that users actually want to repeatedly engage with, rather than just push out marketing or brand messages.  The value in Facebook has always been in getting users to react to, forward, like, or comment on your content; the new feed just makes that more explicit.