Matt McGee says, “Facebook’s efforts to make News Feed more accessible to all users regardless of the speed or reliability of their internet connections has led to a change in how stories are ranked. For brands, publishers and marketers using Facebook, it means that speed is more important than ever.

To understand the change, it helps to first know how News Feed stories used to be ranked. In the past, when a user visited Facebook, the ranking for all possible News Feed stories was calculated on Facebook’s servers and sent to the user in the exact order that Facebook’s algorithm decided was best. The problem was that it didn’t take into account the speed or strength of a user’s internet connection. Last December, Facebook announced that it was changing News Feed to accomodate users with slower connections — but the ranking of stories was still happening on Facebook’s servers.

Not anymore.

Facebook engineers Alexandru Petrescu and Sami Tas explained this week that they’re now able to rank stories on the client side, after they’ve been sent from the server — i.e., as they appear on your phone, tablet or computer”.

Facebook now re-ranks News Feed stories in real time on the client side

Marketing Land

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