Facebook to bump up old stories you may have missed on your News Feed

Feel like you miss out on all the important stories your friends are sharing on Facebook these days? Facebook is thinking up of a solution for you. The social networking giant is rolling out changes to the News Feed design to ensure that you don’t miss out on all the important stories of the day.

After tweaking the algorithms, Facebook executives have showcased the “story bumping” feature that ensures you see older stories you may have missed on the website. The stories that will be featured here will be some that Facebook thinks could be of value to you. What you see will be determined by how many likes, shares and comments these stories receive.

Check older stories out now

Facebook says that on an average, a user has 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages they like. Now, it is not an easy job to display all these stories on their News Feed. One wouldn’t even be able to go through it all in a day. Facebook therefore tries to show you relevant stories, stuff that you’d be interested in. This is achieved over time by listening to user feedback and noticing how users react to stories.

This new update will try and show you stories that you may have missed when you didn’t scroll down far enough to check it out. Facebook will surface these stories if they’re still getting a lot of likes and comments. The social networking website has tested this feature with a small group who seemed to have liked it. It resulted in a 5 percent increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on organic stories people saw from friends and a huge 8 percent increase in interaction with organic stories from Pages. Business owners who do not invest too much into Facebook ads will be happier with this rollout, since it increases the chances of their stories being spotted by the right kind of people.

Facebook has also mentioned that people read 57 percent of the stories on their News Feeds on an average earlier but did not scroll down far enough to see the rest of them. With the resurfacing of stories, the read count increased to 70 percent.

The story bumping rollout has already begun on the web with mobile products slated to get it soon. Facebook has also promised to keep improving the News Feed experience launched in March with algorithm updates.