A Peek Inside How Facebook Decides What Goes Into Your News Feed

A Peek Inside How Facebook Decides What Goes Into Your News Feed

There’s nothing more central to Facebook, literally, than its news feed, the middle column of posted stories from friends and business connections, or on the smartphone, the only column. Besides serving as the key place where ads run, it’s what makes people keep coming back to Facebook–though all too often they wonder why the heck they got this viral video post when their sister’s post got lost in the scrolling depths.

Today during a presentation at its F8 developer conference, Facebook opened up just a little bit beyond its official guide and advice to explain how it determines what goes into that news feed, and how it’s constantly trying to improve it. Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, said the goal is to deliver the 20 things that really matter every day to Facebook’s nearly 1 billion active daily users. 

Three major buckets of data go into what you see from your friends and publishers and marketers you’ve decided to follow, said Adam Mosseri, product management director for news feed.

* Your relationship with your friends and how you interact with them.

* Content, so for example if you look at a lot of photos, you’ll keep seeing more posts with photos in them.

* Activity on posts. For example, Mosseri recently saw a post at the top of the page in the morning featuring a photo of his sister, because it had a person whose posts he interacts with often; it was a photo, which he likes to look at; and there were lots of comments from cousins and other relatives.

 

By the way, despite what you may think, all the posts from your friends will show up in the news feed, but they may be buried far down in the feed, topped by newer posts or those the Facebook algorithm deems more relevant. 

The methods by which Facebook surfaces what it thinks are relevant posts have evolved over the years, and continue to evolve. Lars Backstrom, engineering director for news feed, said Facebook used to look mainly at how many likes and comments a post got.

But they were missing some of the human element, he said, so the team built tools that asked people what they want to see in their news feed. Facebook would present two posts and ask people to decide which one they’d rather see. If they got it right, great. Otherwise, back to the algorithm work.

Over the last year or so, he added, Facebook has also built up a large set of contractors, Facebook members who get paid to tell the company which particular posts they want in their news feed. They rank them up to 5–definitely want to see–which is only 1-2% of stories. A ranking of 4 is want to see too but not definitely. A ranking of 3 means they don’t mind seeing it, but wouldn’t mind seeing other ones instead. And so on.

Facebook also has been proactive recently in culling out posts that may appear popular from click count or sharing but that people say they don’t want to see:

Courtesy "Forbes"