The New SEO – News Feed Optimization (NFO)

Top News and Most Recent. If you have a Facebook profile, you are aware of these two items on the news feed. Many Facebook users don’t even really notice or know the difference between these types of news feed, so to get us started, I will explain each a little bit.

Top News is what Facebook determines your “top news” or the activity you would care about the most. It determines what to put in the top news by your activity on Facebook. The goal of the Top News Feed is to keep the user from being overwhelmed and engaged.

The Most Recent News Feed displays the activity between all of your Facebook connections including pages.  You will see recent activity, posts between common friends, updates from liked pages and more. You always have the option to scroll over to the right and select “Hide” eliminating unwanted posts. (There is a way to unhide these posts if you change your mind later).

Now that everyone has a clear understanding of the two types of news feeds, let’s get to the main question. How do you get your business page to show up on the Top News or catch an eye on the Recent News feed? This is being called News Feed Optimization, a more modern look into SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

News Feed Optimization is based on three factors: affinity score, weight and time decay according to Jenna Lebel of KBuzz, who attended Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference last month. Affinity score is the ranking system between you and the person who created the content. This score will be higher when you interact with pages and engage with them while a lower score will be given to those with less interaction. The affinity score takes into account the number of views each page receives. Weight on the interaction is the next level of measurement. The type of interaction (comment, post, like) is given a level of weight meaning more credit is given to one interaction over another.  Time Decay is the third factor taken into consideration. Facebook grants a piece of content less important as time moves on.

The higher your score with each of these three factors, the more potential you have to rank in your subscribers’ Top News Feed. The more you interact with someone or something, the more likely you will want to continue receiving their content.  Now that you are aware of the new SEO for Social Media: NFO, the most challenging part as a page owner will be getting users to engage and interact with your page.  Good Luck!