Facebook is once again making changes to their News Feed algorithm to make sure you don't miss out on any important posts from your friends. In the event that you didn't scroll down far enough in your News Feed, a new feature known as "Story Bumping" will automatically relocate relevant stories that you might not have gotten to back to the top of your feed.
The social network said a recent test with a small number of users found the change resulted in a five percent increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on organic stories people saw from friends and an eight percent increase in likes, comments and shares from Pages.
Furthermore, the average person only reads 57 percent of the stories in their News Feed. The other 43 percent of stories went unseen at the bottom of the feed. With the change, the average user is now seeing 70 percent of stories.
Facebook is looking to be a bit more transparent about changes made to the News Feed at the request of select users and Page owners. In its early days, users simply saw every update from every friend in their list but as the number of users continued to swell over the years, that method was no longer practical.
Zuckerberg and company eventually implemented a complex algorithm to handle the task of selecting which stories would show up in a feed based on what they believe the user would be most interested in. As such, the social network is starting a new blog series dedicated to News Feed changes. Today's announcement of Story Bumping is the first post in that new series, we're told.
Story Bumping is rolling out today to Facebook users as a behind-the-scenes update.