Story Bumping: How To Get Your Posts Seen On Facebook
By Rebekah Henson August 7, 2013
For more recent coverage of updates to Facebook, please see our latest article, How to Engage Social Followers Using Facebook’s Call-to-Action Button and download our free Social + Email Marketing Guide!
EdgeRank. You might have heard of it. It’s that magic spell Facebook casts to get your posts either seen or buried in the news feed.
Well, almost. Yesterday, Facebook announced a special update to its ranking system to help get your Page’s posts seen more often by more people. This goes along with the news feed’s design overhaul announced earlier this year, which is rolling out to more users.
How EdgeRank has worked
Facebook uses EdgeRank to determine which posts get the top spot in someone’s news feed and which posts don’t. The goal is to show people the posts they want to see and hide the boring content.
What gets shown and what gets buried depends on how followers interact with your posts. Someone who likes and comments on everything you post will see more content from you than someone who doesn’t interact with your posts at all.
EdgeRank looks at three key points to figure out where your Page’s posts fit in people’s feeds:
- Affinity – how connected you are with a certain post. Facebook looks at how often you interact with a friend or Page (by liking, sharing and commenting on posts) to determine Affinity.
- Weight – how popular a post is. The more likes, comments and shares, the greater the Weight.
- Time Decay – how recent and relevant the post is. Facebook doesn’t like “old news” showing up in people’s feeds.
For a more in-depth explanation of how these factors work, check out EdgeRank.net.
It’s been tricky for brands to figure out how to leverage these factors for maximum visibility. Until now…
Facebook’s first EdgeRank update rolling out now
Facebook introduced “Story Bumping” – a way to highlight older posts that might have gotten buried in your followers’ news feeds.
If a post you made early in the day is still getting likes and comments late in the afternoon, Facebook will “bump” your Page’s story back to the top of your followers’ feeds.
In tests Facebook ran, “bumped” stories from Pages got 8% more likes, comments and shares – good news for your business’s Page!
So What Does This Mean For You?
Facebook lays out all the details here. The more you can get people commenting on your Page’s posts, the better!
A few ideas to get you started:
- Ask your fans a question to get them talking.
- Keep it lighthearted – think fun comics or cute pictures to generate more shares.
- Tie your posts to current events to get people liking and commenting.
How do you think Facebook’s Story Bumping will change your current Facebook marketing strategy? Share your ideas in the comments!
You’ll get our free downloadable PDF guide! Click here to download the guide.
AWeber is an email marketing platform that allows 100,000+ small businesses and entrepreneurs to create and send emails people love. Learn more about what AWeber can do for your small business.
Simone Anne
8/7/2013 10:34 amThanks for the update!
Tammy
8/7/2013 2:24 pmThanks for letting us know! I do not think it will change my ability, as I am a small company that does not have many followers yet. It is nice to know that they are trying to level the playing field, although I still think that the ‘big dogs’ still win in this area!
Thank you for bringing it to our attention!
Jenny Pearce
8/8/2013 2:52 amI am loving your blog – another very useful one – thanks!
David Hutcherson
8/8/2013 2:09 pmThis will be very rewarding for those who do social media right. And by right, I mean really engaging with their audience. I won’t have to really change my strategy I now know that my engagement efforts will pay off.
Bob Traweek
8/8/2013 3:00 pmFacebook has ruined my latest promo with a cartoon caption contest. Their new “magic” as your article describes this catastrophe, has squelched my Caption the Cartoon campaign to near death. Our usual page views on an ad campaign run from 1300 to 1700 in a week. Not bad with 200 or so likes. As we progressed to 300 likes this week and added 33% email subscribers in a couple of weeks, we’d expected more views. The email ad was sent out last Wednesday and we didn’t get a single sale from it. Additionally the FB “magic” changed our views to 328 for almost a week. That is not MAGIC. Results have been frustrating with a 33% increase in email subscribers but a lower open rate…down from 44% to 33%, which adds up to the same numbers. I may terminate the account due to frustration.
Corwin Nighthawk
8/8/2013 11:59 pmMy problem is getting more than one or two interactions per post. Usually, when I ask for an opinion, I get no replies. I attribute this to the fact that 24 hours after posting, I see “3 people saw this post”. That’s 3 fans out of 55.
The only time I ever get any real interaction is when I pay for advertising, which I’m unable to do very often. I can’t really see the update making any real impact for me. I think it will only affect the pages that have over 1,000 active fans. Getting to that point is a different animal altogether.
Rachel Henke
8/9/2013 3:45 amExcellent post. Thanks for the update on the mysteries of Facebook visibility!
Randall Magwood
8/11/2013 6:45 pmI’m not sure if it will cause much change in my Facebook and marketing strategy. I do pretty good on Facebook now, and i do a wide variety of other marketing strategies too. So i’m all booked up, but Edgerank sounds cool.
Nimrod
8/12/2013 3:16 amThanks for this update, I could definitely use this when considering what kind of stuff to post on my fb pages.
Ava Cristi
8/23/2013 8:40 amGreat article Rebekah! I learned a lot from this article.Honestly,I’m not familiar with EdgeRank but I will try to research more about this stuff soon.Thanks for sharing these tips!
Sharry
9/23/2013 3:03 pmUgh, EdgeRank. Definitely the worst ever. Terrible for businesses, although it’s really good for Facebook and their advertising revenue
Usama Ejaz
2/18/2014 10:44 pmYuck :/
Its good but can be bad sometimes