The social media giant Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg on the 4th of February 1994. This young inventor was soon to find out the imperativeness of creating the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM. Then he was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard. Since then Facebook has grown to become a global brand, boasting over 2.07 billion million users as at the last quarter of 2017. With the skyrocket in the number of Facebook users, it became imperative that they devised a means to help users view the most interesting newsfeeds.







The means through which newsfeeds to be displayed are selected is through the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM.

FACEBOOK ALGORITHM is the means through which they streamline the numerous feeds pouring into your account. Newsfeeds are a summary of the activities of your friends on Facebook. These activities might involve posting or commenting on a status update, getting tagged in a photo, and so on. So, FACEBOOK ALGORITHM narrows this many feeds and selects only the interesting ones and displays them for you. FACEBOOK ALGORITHM in a lay-mans term is just about who is allowed to see your content and this is largely determined by Quality. Well, quality is one of the factors but there are other things that influence the newsfeed that FACEBOOK ALGORITHM displays.

A few of them will be examined next…

First, it is named a newsfeed for a reason. The reason is that Facebook wants to be your one-stop shop for the latest news happenings around the world. With this goal, they support journalists and broadcasting firms and bring those newsworthy materials directly to users through the feeds. This is why you are likely to see news materials on your feeds. Another factor that affects the newsfeed displayed for you to view by FACEBOOK ALGORITHM is your family and friends. Facebook was built on the bedrock of connecting family and long lost friends. That is why posts and status updates by family and friends will be seen faster than that of regular people.

Also as stated earlier, your content helps in deciding the number of people that will view your update. You should try to make anything you post have content quality. Even if you post a link to a blog or website, let it have quality content. When you have the quality you are one step closer to a larger audience. This is because Facebook recognizes you for the quality and depth of your posts and so they increase the viewers. When you post quality materials regularly, overtime the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM identifies you as a reliable user. And also one with quality content and your posts will be displayed to more users.

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HOW DOES FACEBOOK DECIDE WHAT TO POST

Facebook’s Vice President of Product Management for Newsfeed Adam Mosseri was at the F8 summit recently organized. He broke down how the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM decides on what content to post and what to forget forever. But, he first explained what the algorithms mean. He said that an Algorithm is a formula or set of steps for solving a particular problem. So in essence, we can come to the conclusion that the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM is the means of them solving the problem what to display on your newsfeed. So, the ranking system used to determine what feed should be displayed is based on three basic elements. These elements will be discussed below and they are as follows:

First Element

One is the affinity between the user and the content of the post or the sender. For instance, a newsfeed of a Texas flood has an affinity to Facebook users in America than users in Kenya. So the affinity or closeness to the user is an element used to decide what newsfeed to display for you. The closer the news or incidence is the more likely you will see it on your newsfeeds.







Second Element

The second element they employ in helping them determine what to display for you is the Weight. The content of the post is another way in which they streamline information and decide what to display to you. The more important the content of a post, the more it will be seen by more users. For example, if Donald Trump decided to step down from the Presidency and return to business. It is sure to be posted for many to see as the weight and impact of the news are massive. This story will be picked anytime over say a story that the population of rats is twice that of humans. This is because the Donald Trump story has more consequence to it than the story on the population of rats.

Third Element

The last of the three basic elements by which posts to display is decided by FACEBOOK ALGORITHM is Time. It is called a newsfeed because they are seeking to bring the news to the user. And the news is only news as long as it is new. So the currency of your post is another means which they streamline the numerous posts and decide what to display. These are the three basic elements considered by the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM. But this does not mean they are the only ones there is a host of other things they consider which I will not discuss now.

The FACEBOOK ALGORITHM has helped to bring us the interesting posts and take away the mediocrities. This can account for the growth of Facebook since they began using the Algorithms system. The number of users has tripled since the introduction of the FACEBOOK ALGORITHM. And we the users are grateful for its timely introduction and indispensable service.

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