One of the biggest issues that businesses that market on Facebook have with the platform is that their posts often get overlooked in user news feeds. Because of the speed and frequency in which the news feed gets updated, it?s very common for most posts to never even be read. Facebook?s Story Bump feature is changing this so that your posts have a better chance of being seen.
The story bump feature allows organic stories that a user didn?t scroll far down enough to see, to reappear at the top of the News Feed if they?re getting a lot of engagement (likes, comments, and shares).
Story bumps put an added focus on generating high quality, engaging content. And Facebook?s tests have shown that the change is very effective. Facebook saw an 8% increase in the amount of likes, comments, and shares of organic stories posted by pages.
Also, prior to the change, users only read 57% of the stories in their newsfeed. They couldn?t see the remaining 43% because they didn?t scroll down far enough. After the previously unread stories resurfaced, the percentage of read stories increased to 70%.
Even though ?Engagement? is starting to become a buzz word, the fact of the matter is that it is a huge priority for Facebook. This is a similar approach to how Google?s search algorithm works.
Both Google and Facebook want to give users the information that?s most relevant/interesting to them. In Facebook?s case, they focus on giving you the most popular stories. So the more your posts are getting liked, commented on, and shared, the more likely they will be to appear at the top of user news feeds.
The biggest benefit of the story bump feature for medical professionals is that it increases the life of your posts. According to research done by Wisemetrics, the average post gets 75% of its total impressions within 2.5 hours. Posts reach their maximum reach in less than 2 hours. This means the window of time for your posts to be seen is extremely small. So there is less time for people to like, share, and comment on your posts before they look at something else.
Story bumping gives your posts a second chance by bringing them back to life, even if it was originally posted hours ago. But it all starts with creating great posts that encourage users to share.