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Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO
July 16th, 2007
| By Justin Smith | 64 Comments » |
Everybody with a website knows that Google owns two of their most important marketing channels: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM). In fact, entire cottage industries have developed around them:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – gaming Google (and the other search engines) into thinking you’re authoritative on a given topic and deserve to be listed highly in its search results.
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – paying Google (and the others) to put you next to sites it thinks it is authoritative on a given topic.
Inside Facebook, however, Google is irrelevant. Instead, Facebook owns your most important marketing channels: the News Feed, Notifications, and Messages. And marketers and application developers have analagous marketing options with Facebook as with Google on the open web:
NFO (News Feed Optimization) – convincing Facebook to display the Feed items that your application publishes in your users’ friends’ News Feeds.- NFM (News Feed Marketing) - paying Facebook to insert your ad next to Feed items that it thinks are important enough to be shown.
News Feed Marketing is fairly easy for marketers to understand: give Facebook your credit card number, and they’ll stick you in the News Feeds and guarantee a certain quantity of targeted traffic to your Facebook application or sponsored group.
News Feed Optimization, on the other hand, is a bit trickier:
- Like Google’s PageRank algorithms, Facebook’s proprietary “FeedRank” (my term) algorithms determine which Feed items are shown to whom and which items are not.
- Like Google’s undisclosed PageRank algorithm, the variables that contribute to your Feed item’s FeedRank are unknown to you (and everyone except Facebook).
- Like companies dependent on their SEO’d Google PageRank, companies dependent on their NFO’d Facebook FeedRank will experience similar trauma when the algorithm unpredictably or inexplicably changes.
Welcome to the new world of NFO–the new SEO for Facebook marketers. Optimizing your product’s News Feed items is the single most important thing you can do as a marketer on Facebook. Not only should Feed items be designed for optimal conversion, but they should also be invoked by your application in ways that will maximize their distribution.
Designing High Performance News Feed Items
1. The most important thing you can do as a Facebook application marketer is to publish engaging, authentic Feed items. Whenever a user performs an action within your application, consider whether hearing about that action would be valuable to that user’s friends. If so, publish a Feed item about that event.
For example, the Moods application invokes a Feed item when a user changes their mood. The feed item simply contains this contextually appropriate “news” about my friend Holly–she has updated her mood within the Moods application (I’m glad to hear she’s feeling happy).
Likewise, the Books application publishes a Feed item when a user indicates that they have started or finished reading a book. This is also news that I find appropriate and interesting about my friend–I might even casually follow up with Jonathan about this “news”.
2. Be sure you optimize your Feed items for all of the Feed item elements made available to you by Facebook: title, body, and images. The Facebook Developers Feed Item documentation describes the requirements and limitations of each Feed item element as the following:
- The title is required, and is limited to 60 displayed characters (excluding tags).
- The a tag is allowed, and there can be zero or one instance in the title.
- One fb:userlink tag is allowed, and the uid parameter must be populated with the user id on whose behalf the action is being published. If there is no such fb:userlink tag found, then one is automatically prepended to the title.
- The fb:name tag is allowed, and there may be multiple instances of this tag.
- No other tags are allowed.
- The body is optional, is limited to 200 displayed characters (excluding tags), and can include the tags fb:userlink, fb:name, a, b, and i.
- Up to 4 images can be displayed, which will be shrunk to fit within 75×75, cached, and formatted by Facebook. Images can either be a URL, or a facebook PID. If it is a URL, you must own the image and grant Facebook the permission to cache it. Each image must have a link associated with it, which must start with http://
As you notice above, both Moods and Feeds use short titles to get your attention and longer, more descriptive bodies. Moods also includes an image, which is very attention grabbing.
Be careful, however, to resist the temptation to always max out the images you include with every feed item just because they’re “essentially free ad space”. This could make your Feed items seem spammy and adversely affect your Feed item conversion rate.
3. Include inviting, provocative calls to action that lead the reader to install the application directly.
Ultimately, the value of the News Feed the application developer is that it’s powerful, free marketing. The News Feed can be used to convert your users’ friends to do things you want them to do – like install your application. You need to make this conversion process as quick and easy as possible.
For example, you’ll notice that the Moods application asks the reader, “How are you feeling?” immediately after the Feed item body. Clicking this link leads to the Moods application installation page. As a result, the Moods application has experienced significant growth despite not doing any active marketing.
The Books application prompts the reader to click on the title of the book my friend just finished reading. However, clicking this link does not lead me to install the application, but rather through an affiliate link to Amazon, where the Books developer will earn a commission on anything I purchase.
Achieving Optimal News Feed Distribution
In addition to designing Feed items for optimal conversion, your application should also invoke Feed items in ways that will maximize their distribution. Like Google’s PageRank algorithm, Facebook’s FeedRank algorithm is and will remain unpublished by Facebook in order to fight the war on Feed spam. This, however, presents obvious challenges to application marketers.
I spoke with Facebook Senior Software Engineer Justin Rosenstein about News Feeds and the selection algorithms last week. While he wouldn’t divulge the algorithm 
, he did offer the following facts about News Feed:
- News Feed publishes just a little more than 0.2% of the stories it considers. This means that out of every 1,000 feed items that are selectable for publication, only 2 become News Feed items that friends see.
- The Facebook weighting algorithms apply some general principles, but they primarily rely on behavior specific to each user. This means that while your Feed item may score highly on many factors, Facebook will hide your Feed items for some users it thinks wouldn’t find your item interesting. Facebook considers nearly every available source of data it has on each user to help calibrate their weights and deliver the best stories.
- Facebook is constantly improving their algorithm as new data becomes available. This means your experience will change with time. What is true today may not be true tomorrow.
- Users can also help direct News Feed outside its normal bounds with their News Feed Preferences. Remember, Facebook lets users weight Feed items from certain friends more or less interesting–though it doesn’t have a general “Application” weight preference slider.
The Facebook Developer documentation on Feed item publishing parameters and limits has been changing almost every week since the Platform launched in late May, and as such the FeedRank algorithms are still very much a work in progress. For example, recently, Facebook had explained its algorithm in terms of a points system in which application developers get 5 points per user per day to spend on Feed items, where points spent on a given Feed item boost its FeedRank.
Now, however, Facebook places the following limits on Feed items:
facebook.feed.publishStoryToUser – Publishes a News Feed story to the user. Applications are limited to calling this function once every 12 hours for each user. The story may or may not show up in the user’s News Feed, depending on the number and quality of competing stories.- facebook.feed.publishActionOfUser – Publishes a Mini-Feed story to the user, and publishes News Feed stories to the friends of that user. Applications are limited to calling this function ten (10) times for each user in a rolling 48-hour window. The story may or may not show up in the user’s friends’ News Feeds, depending on the number and quality of competing stories.
Ultimately, gaming the News Feed is going to be harder than gaming Google’s PageRank algorithm because of the personalized nature of Feed item selection. Because so many components of FeedRank depend on individual user behavior, there is only so much you can do as an application developer to boost your Feed item’s score across the board aside from designing rich, engaging Feed items that convert well.
That being said, it’s probably only a matter of time before the same type of people who created PayPerPost set up a new type of shop to game Facebook: in a world where individual behavior matters most, I’m sure you will soon be able to buy not only application distribution, but also News Feed clicks, hoping that Facebook will believe that your feed items really are that interesting.
[tags]facebook,news feed optimization,news feed marketing, nfo, nfm[/tags]
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July 16th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Well said, Justin. I wanted to point out that for my application (Books), the clause that requires you have copyrights for images shown is a bit of a downer. I’d have liked to be able to show the book cover, but can’t. I’d imagine many other developers are in this spot as well!
July 16th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Justin…as usual, great post!
I really like the Moods app too.
July 16th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Nice summary on your chat with Justin Rosenstein, and the insight into how only 0.2% of news feeds are published is certainly very true.
I think as a result of the selective nature of the the facebook algorithm, combined with the social policing (facebook users naturally avoiding spam and commercial behaviour from other users), will prevent people such as PayPerPost getting a foothold of the the facebook world.
The essence of facebook has been pretty much commercial free (other then the dedicated marketplace) and focused on your friends. As long as that’s the case, I think facebook will continue to grow.
July 16th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Nice informative post. It might be worth a try, even if very few get read.
July 17th, 2007 at 7:48 am
[...] this following post from Inside Facebook, they suggests that Google is not relevant in Facebook, Facebook has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems. Facebook has it’s own search tool, it’s own social network to find [...]
July 17th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
holy crap, justin.
you just blew my previous article on Marketing Facebook Apps out of the water with this post.
thanks for the link love above, but i think i’m going to have to refer to this piece as the definitive work on the subject (that is, until i get my shit together and try to one-up you… but that’s gonna be tough
in the words of wayne & garth: “WE’RE NOT WORTHY! WE’RE NOT WORTHY!”
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
July 17th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
I liked the numbers. Any developer that is doing a facebook app know the details around the API, and probably realized these things on some subliminal level. It’s good that you’re exposing it to non-developers.
It is interesting to think about that. I wonder how advanced their News Feed algorithm is.
July 17th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Justin,
This is great guidance. A lot of people are experimenting with marketing in Facebook, but this is an approach the has some great potential.
-4MySales
July 18th, 2007 at 2:46 am
[...] Smith from Inside Facebook made an interesting and detailed observations on Dave’s premise that reads likewise Welcome to the new world of News Feed Optimization [...]
July 18th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
And the best part of being the user? I get to decide which items I want to broadcast to my friends. If your app comes across as spammy: gone.
At least I can be more transparent in my NFO decisions than Google.
July 18th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
[...] Dave McClure analyses Justin Smith’s article saying Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the new SEO. [...]
July 18th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
[...] clipped from http://www.insidefacebook.com [...]
July 18th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
[...] recently read a great story on InsideFacebook.com about News Feed Optimization for Facebook. Here is a bit of it [...]
July 19th, 2007 at 12:08 am
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO Google owns two of their most important marketing channels: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM). Aa with Google, marketers and application developers have analagous options with Facebook : NFO (News Feed Optimization) and NFM (News Feed Marketing). (tags: application design development f8 facebook feed marketing seo nfo tech business advertising) [...]
July 19th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO (tags: facebook marketing SEO SEM) [...]
July 20th, 2007 at 6:58 am
[...] “Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers” – Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO. [...]
July 20th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO (tags: facebook marketing seo nfo SEM design development) [...]
July 22nd, 2007 at 5:26 am
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO (tags: facebook Marketing SEO SEM) [...]
July 22nd, 2007 at 6:18 am
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO (tags: facebook) [...]
July 25th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
[...] of 10 Billion but if I had 4 billion I’d snatch it up faster than a Swedish Martini. News Feed Optimization on Facebook is the New SEO: Umm, yeah I’m not so sure about this one but it’s an interesting read [...]
July 28th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Justin – thanks for this. Great to see some numbers and good analysis of the news feed. Several of our Facebook app development clients have been asking about exactly this!
July 30th, 2007 at 10:40 am
[...] Further Reading Facebook: Anatomy of a Facebook Application Master of 500 Hats: Marketing Facebook Apps: All About the FEED, n00bs! Inside Facebook: NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO [...]
July 31st, 2007 at 11:03 pm
[...] Justin/Inside Facebook: Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO [...]
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:22 pm
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August 4th, 2007 at 5:29 am
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO very interesting about facebook seo (tags: facebook) [...]
August 8th, 2007 at 4:15 am
[...] This brings me to a fascinating search engine optimization (SEO) type article: Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO [...]
August 12th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO Up to 4 images can be displayed, which will be shrunk to fit within 75×75, cached, and formatted by Facebook. Images can either be a URL, or a facebook PID. If it is a URL, you must own the image and grant Facebook the permission to … [...]
August 15th, 2007 at 3:23 am
[...] “Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers” – Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO. [...]
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:05 am
[...] few weeks ago, Facebook thought leaders Dave and Justin identified and shaped the term News Feed Optimization. Sadly, (or gladly) we suspect it has already [...]
September 8th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
[...] SEO; the best way to thrust your online presence into the forethought of the online masses. (see Inside Facebook or the follow-up post from Dave McClure) The News Feed has become the newest testing grounds for [...]
September 11th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO Everybody with a website knows that Google owns two of their most important marketing channels: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM). Inside Facebook, however, Google is irrelevant. (tags: sem NFO seo marketing) [...]
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 am
[...] to specific users, or to no one in particular via the Feed. Facebook then uses a proprietary News Feed Optimization (NFO) algorithm to determine when and to whom those news items are shown, similar in concept to how [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 4:46 am
[...] to specific users, or to no one in particular via the Feed. Facebook then uses a proprietary News Feed Optimization (NFO) algorithm to determine when and to whom those news items are shown, similar in concept to how [...]
October 29th, 2007 at 9:50 am
[...] News feeds are one of the main features of Facebook. After all they might represent the Facebook answer to AdWords, with targeted ads based on the profile of the users and their social network. [...]
October 29th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO Inside Facebook, however, Google is irrelevant. Instead, Facebook owns your most important marketing channels: the News Feed, Notifications, and Messages. [Hence:] # NFO (News Feed Optimization) # NFM (News Feed Marketing) (tags: facebook attention advertising algorithm marketing bestpractices socialdesign smo) [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO (tags: facebook seo) [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 10:14 am
[...] announcement reenforces more than ever that newsfeed optimization is the new search engine optimization or more correctly now that there are ad options, newsfeed marketing is the new search [...]
November 20th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO [...]
November 21st, 2007 at 3:34 pm
[...] את מקצוע קידום האתרים במנועי חיפוש SEO ו SEM למוזיאון האם- מת המלך (SEO) יחי המלך החדש (NFO) [...]
November 26th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
[...] has described in some detail the challenges of creating a news feed that actually displays the most relevant information. Its [...]
November 26th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
[...] news feed algorithm so that only the most relevant actions are displayed. Facebook has described in some detail the challenges of doing this. Its existing news feed algorithm searches through the thousands of [...]
November 27th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Funny, I was just thinking the point about the Facebook spam at the bottom. I’m thinking it would have to be automated, rather than PPP though, because it wouldn’t scale well to have humans do it for one thing (and spam is essentially a scale tactic), and because you’d probably need to spend time on the page you clicked to – not so efficient for a person to be doing. On the flip side, getting wallposts from a bot like “nice new profile pic… btw, did u check out this app: spammyapp?” would probably require human personalization to be more effective.
November 30th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
[...] Facebook owns your most important marketing channels: the News Feed, Notifications, and Messages.read more | digg [...]
December 9th, 2007 at 1:42 am
[...] News Feed Optimization [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 5:04 am
[...] את מקצוע קידום האתרים במנועי חיפוש SEO ו SEM למוזיאון האם- מת המלך (SEO) יחי המלך החדש (NFO) [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] News Feed Optimization [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 10:53 am
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO Justin Smith, Inside Facebook | 7/16/07 [...]
January 16th, 2008 at 2:25 am
[...] Inside Facebook » Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO (tags: advertising application article attention blog business google design marketing media network news search social socialnetwork web web2.0 Facebook SEO SocialSoftware innovation internet product productdevelopment software strategy traffic tools trends usability UI) [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 3:21 am
[...] is also validated by the importance thought leaders are placing on news feed optimization, such as Justin Smith and Dave [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 12:02 am
[...] value by syndicating your feed items to thousands of users’ home pages inside Facebook. In a previous post, I examined some of the tactics application developers can employ to optimize their feed items for [...]
February 17th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
[...] on InsideFacebook the industry’s first truly insightful analysis. He talked about “News Feed Optimization“- a concept that proposed optimizing the newsfeed for Facebook apps was the equivalent of [...]
February 18th, 2008 at 7:00 am
[...] Back in July, Justin Smith of InsideFacebook announced that newsfeed optimization was in fact the new SEO. By the end of October, both Justin and myself had data that showed otherwise. Since then a lot has [...]
February 21st, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Jason Calacanis Crushes My Facebook News Feed…
I’ve got 99 friends on Facebook but I hear from Jason Calacanis more than anyone. He has turned Facebook into a marketing platform for his human-powered search engine, Mahaho. And he doesn’t pay Facebook a dime for this primo branding opp…
March 10th, 2008 at 3:58 am
// Prepare the feed data and layout.
// Prepare the feed data and layout.
/*$titleTemplate = “{‘actor’} hit with {item}!”;
$titleData = json_encode(array(
‘item’ => ‘a water balloon’,
));
//$target = $_POST['target_id'];
// Perform the API method call.
$facebook->api_client->feed_publishTemplatizedAction(
$titleTemplate, $titleData, ”, ”, ”,
null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null,
null);
it’s getting me error
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO [...]
May 12th, 2008 at 2:15 am
[...] value by syndicating your feed items to thousands of users’ home pages inside Facebook. In a previous post, I examined some of the tactics application developers can employ to optimize their feed items for [...]
May 18th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Adversting on facebook has proven commercially not beneficial for business users and this still highlights the issues of ‘can this be a way to make more profit for users than facebook themselve” great article and guess its worth trying.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO Justin Smith, Inside Facebook | 7/16/07 [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 9:02 am
[...] to specific users, or to no one in particular via the Feed. Facebook then uses a proprietary News Feed Optimization (NFO) algorithm to determine when and to whom those news items are shown, similar in concept to how [...]
January 21st, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Hi Justin,
the question I’m going to ask you isn’t about developing a Facebook app (sorry, I’m a little OT), but about something weird I found in the RSS feed importing.
I’m importing my blog’s posts using the official importer, as Facebook notes. But I found that, while the notes I write manually are visible in my friends’ news feeds, the notes that are automatically imported from my blog aren’t visible.
Am I wrong, or am I missing some setting? Is there some Facebook app that does the same, but in a more visible way?
(sorry for my bad English)
March 12th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
This is the direction the entire economy is going, better jump on in now.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Good, for face book users . I want to thank for NFO (SEO).
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
[...] Page managers need to start thinking about News Feed Optimization (NFO) too. In other words, what do you need to do to maximize your Page’s updates in the News Feed? [...]
October 30th, 2009 at 6:32 am
Excellent Professional Post, I am interested in facebook now.. thanks alot! LOL