Facebook Newsfeed and Social Search

Search seems to be heading social. Microsoft is starting to introduce a new feature into Bing which shows you what your Facebook friends like when you search. It's called instant personalisation.

We're not entirely convinced about this in the office - when we search WE want to decide what to look at. Just because our friends like something doesn't mean that we will. That's the beauty of having friends - we all like different things and it broadens our horizons.

Facebook does seem to be on a bit of a roll with this - have a think about Facebook news feeds - do you think that you get to see every update from every one of your friends? Think again. Facebook is deciding what to show you rather than showing you everything that is happening with your friends.

I had suspected that this was the case but I didn't have any clear indications why this was happening. I noticed that sometimes I was missing some of my friends updates or photos but couldn't figure out why. The same thing was also happening to my other half - but why?

I found a really interesting article from The Daily Beast who had conducted an experiment to see what influenced what they see on their friend feed. You can read this post on 'Cracking the Facebook code' here. If you are using Facebook for business it will really help you to understand how to raise your profile effectively.

What this experiment discovered was that Facebook appears to have a bias against newcomers. This bias was only overcome when established users interacted with the newbie content like links and photographs. Stalking people won't make you appear on their newsfeeds either - only when people are stalking YOU and interacting with your Facebook content will you appear on newsfeeds!

Much to my suprise this study also discovered that links which you post appear more often than status updates. Perplexed by this I then discovered that photos and videos have more strength than links. Clearly content that people can engage with (causing them to spend more time on the site) like links, photos, videos and comments are what influences the news feed on your Facebook page.

The implications of this for business are that you need to engage with your fans and more importantly get them to engage with you to raise your profile. There's more to social media strategies than meets the eye - in this economic climate it's more important than ever to make sure you make the best use of your time that you can. We hope this blog post helps with that.

Posted by Dan at 20/10/2010 14:20:00