How To Get Your Posts Into Top News On Facebook

For many people Facebook has become a vital marketing and promotional tool. But, having built up a network of friends, you are only halfway there. Ideally you want your Facebook friends to see your postings in their News Feed when they log on to the site. Unfortunately, Facebook could be sabotaging your hard work and making your posts invisible. Here’s how to get round this problem.

You may not have noticed but there are two ways of viewing your News Feed on Facebook. The default view is ‘Top News’ and next to it is the often overlooked ‘Most Recent’. If you click on ‘Most Recent’ you will see a strictly chronological view of everything posted by your friends on Facebook. On the other hand, the default view, ‘Top News’, is what most people will see, and this is a ‘selected highlights’ type of view, which means that lots of postings are filtered out of it. If your postings are filtered out of someone’s ‘Top News’, the posts will be effectively invisible to that person.

Facebook employs an algorithm that filters some posts out of ‘Top News’. If a post has a lot of activity on it, in the form of ‘Likes’ and comments, Facebook will interpret this as a more social post and therefore upgrade it in the News Feed. This is rather like ‘Explore’ on Flickr or ‘Trending Topics’ on Twitter. Once something enters such categories it becomes more visible, and attracts even more attention. At the top end, it is described as having ‘gone viral’. In the case of Facebook, you should encourage activity on your posts, by adding comments yourself, and by asking questions that invite a response. Once you start getting ‘Likes’ and other responses, your post is almost certain to make ‘Top News’.

Another factor in making Facebook’s ‘Top News’ is frequency of posting. You should post regularly as this boosts your activity ranking. On the other hand, you should avoid repetitive, boring or obviously spam-like posts as this will turn your friends against you. Apart from attracting little activity, such posts may even encourage friends to set you to ‘ignore’ or even to block you.

It is a fine line on Facebook between steady output and excess. Get it right, with regular posts that are interesting or funny, and you should keep yourself in ‘Top News’. Get it wrong, and you risk descending into a black hole where your posts disappear unseen into the Facebook ether.