Facebook ‘Bumping’ Opens Opportunities in Social Media SEO

Ever wonder why you see what you see in your Facebook feed? Why you see status updates from certain brands and certain friends and newer stories compared to updates from the previous night? It’s all part of Facebook’s use of its algorithms to ‘deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.’

That’s what the company wrote in an August blog post about why it was starting to lift the lid on the how and why of your Facebook feed. It’s been a few weeks since the new transparency was announced, and we wanted to see how it affects your social media marketing practices.

So *how* does the Facebook news feed work? Essentially, you’re controlling how Facebook adjusts your feeds. For instance, your news feed will adjust with how often you interact with a friend’s page, a particular brand’s or company’s page, and how many likes, shares, and comments these friends and pages receive. The feed will also adjust itself to how often you have previously interacted with these types of posts. Facebook is also checking the last 50 interactions that users make. They use that experience to help rank stories as well.

Since that initial post, there have not been any other updates from the company on ‘story bumping.’ But its explanation has helped social media marketers to come up with a few ways to alter your Facebook newsfeed to see more of your following. Let’s take a look:

• Deliver new content every day. By bring new content to your company or brand page daily, you can set the content schedule, and it helps train your followers to expect that for your page. Offer a new topic or idea, try a weekly contest, craft a new video for ideas in comments, and more, while using a searchable hashtag for others seeking the topic.
• Build follower engagement: Make your content worthy of engagement. A medical malpractice law firm might post insights into past medical malpractice cases and make those cases legally interesting. That would be interesting reading. Seek out comments from followers and build engagement on the topic, and soon your followers will see your company content on a more regular basis.
• Be controversial with your content. Facebook is rewarding how well your page engages its followers. How best to do that? You might want to set up a weekly ‘big idea’ to pith a controversial topic in your business area among customers. With the right push, you might see a lot of pros and cons being debated on your page. And that will bring more regular Facebook views from followers.

These are just a few of the small ways to promote your Facebook page better, build engagement, get seen by more followers, and make the social network work in your favor. Continue the discussion if you’re interested in discussing more ideas about your business’s Facebook and online marketing strategies.

What’s worked for you since learning more about story bumping? Have you altered your company’s brand or page strategy? Tell us about it in the comments.