Facebook Algorithm Updated – No more begging for likes or crappy memes

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Facebook Algorithm updated to reduce Like begging and crappy memes

Facebook announced last week (23rd August) that they are making changes to the News Feed Algorithm (EdgeRank) which should reduce the number of “Click Like if you love cats” or crappy memes you see in your News Feed.

Facebook’s aim is to make sure that the best quality content is being produced, surfaced and shared. Their latest update to the News Feed ranking algorithm helps ensure that the organic content people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.

Facebook Algorithm changes: An example of an image "Like Begging"

So how did they go about changing the Facebook Algorithm?

“While the goal of News Feed is to show high quality posts to people, we wanted to better understand what high quality means. To do this we decided to develop a new algorithm to factor into News Feed.

To develop it, we first surveyed thousands of people to understand what factors make posts from Pages high quality.

Some of the questions we asked included:”

  • Is this timely and relevant content?
  • Is this content from a source you would trust?
  • Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
  • Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)
  • Would you call this a low quality post or meme?
  • Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?

Once they had the results in they developed a new Facebook algorithm, and then tested it with a small segment of their users and found:

  • By showing these high quality posts higher up in News Feed, we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content
  • People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall

These results suggest that this change shows more people higher quality content, and more interesting stories from the Pages they are connected to and Facebook will be rolling out this update to everyone over the next few weeks.

Will this affect my Facebook page?

If your Facebook posts consist mainly of begging for likes or memes then yes, the changes to the Facebook Algorithm will affect you. You will probably see a reduction in your reach, but if you continue to provide good quality content that people want to read and engage with then no, it will be business as usual.

Buffer now lets you share to Google+ pages

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Fantastic news Google+ has now been added as a feed to Buffer.

Our favourite posts scheduling app Buffer has just been updated with the Google+ API and you can now schedule your posts to Google+ as well as Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.

The email has just dropped in to our Inbox and as with the feeds, connecting to Google+ was easy and took a matter of seconds.

Here’s the Buffer announcement about Google+

 

An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next.

It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone.

Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+ Page up to date.

And they have written a guide with lots of pictures to help you add Google+ to your Buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/introducing-buffer-for-google-plus-pages-scheduling-posting-social-media

You can now use Buffer to post to Google+

Not using Buffer?

Well you should. Buffer is a great way to quickly and easily schedule your posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter & now Google+. By installing their Google Chrome app, when you spot a story or image you would like to post about. just click the Buffer icon and that’s it. If you want to change, add or edit the wording then that’s easy as well.

You can set up multiple  posting schedules for each Social Media Feed. So say twice a day for Twitter and once for Facebook. It really is a fantastic and best of all it is completely FREE!

Here’s that link again… bufferapp.com

 

 

 

Facebook roll out nested comment replies to pages

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Nested comment replies on Facebook Business Pages are here!

What a lovely surprise was in store when we logged in this morning. Facebook have enabled nested replies on our page. This is a feature we have been waiting a long time for. It’s always been difficult replying to a specific comment if someone else has also commented and your reply would get lost. Now you can reply to specific comments and Facebook will nest them, and bring active conversations to the top.

This is what the Facebook help page says about them:

Now, replies are shown below the comments, so it’s clear who’s responding to which comment.  The most active conversations are shown at the top, and comments marked as spam are moved to the bottom.

Have you checked your page yet to see if it’s rolled out yet?

YouTube reaches a billion monthly viewers

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YouTube has announced that one billion people are now regular users of the video-sharing website.

In a post on their official blog, YouTube said that the number of unique monthly users  had passed one billion.

“If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” the triumphant post said.

YouTube is quickly catching up with Facebook which hit a billion users last month.

Launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, YouTube quickly grew and by 2006, had already attracted an audience estimated at 50 million worldwide users a month. Shortly after Google stepped in and bought the company for what was then thought to be an over valued price of $1.65bn.

The Financial Times estimated that in 2012 YouTube generated $1.3bn in video advertising. Many hundreds of millions more are thought to be generated from search and banner advertising on the site,