How to Get High on the New Facebook News Feed Using ‘Story Bumping’ and ‘Last Actor’ Signals

Has Facebook killed EdgeRank, its algorithm to determine which posts appear in your News Feed?

Maybe in name internally, but Facebook still uses other algorithms to arrange stories in the News Feed. Yesterday Facebook introduced Story Bumping and Last Actor, and ways to display content from the user you interacted with most recently.
 

How To Take Advantage of Story Bumping

Now, if you run out of time to continue scrolling through your News Feed, stories you missed might be “bumped” back into the top of your News Feed. This will happen mostly when a post becomes popular on the network by receiving a high number of interactions. This feature is sure to increase the longevity of popular posts, but this likely comes at the expense of less engaging posts that will now make an even quicker exit from the News Feed. This makes it more important than ever for you to post interesting material, as posts that are naturally rich will receive the highest numbers of likes and comments and therefore more face time and visibility.

How To Take Advantage of Last Actor

Facebook keeps track of the last 50 posts you’ve interacted with and uses this information to place related content in your News Feed the next time you log on. For Pages it will be paramount to publish one of the last 50 posts your fans have interacted with in order to receive the Last Actor bonus. This could mean that businesses that are able to significantly increase their post frequencies (while not degrading content quality) could see major gains from this constant traction generated in the News Feed.

It will be interesting to see how the News Feeds’ new algorithms play out as Page owners implement new marketing strategies according to the changes. Regardless, though, try to maintain a careful balance of fresh and timely content to your brand page; though the News Feed changes may tempt you to post much more often, doing so could annoy your fans and increasing the chance of your Page being “unliked.”

To post or not to post: that remains the question for brands. Just keep your content interesting, and by all means keep it coming! Just remember that most things are best done within moderation.