‘Why am I seeing this?’ feature helps FB users decide what they want to see

Facebook Malaysia just announced that the set of options that Facebook is calling “Why am I seeing this?” is coming to Malaysia – and it does just that.

This set of tools bring options for you to control what and who you want to see more on your newsfeed.

Facebook knows that users still dwell on the past where Facebook lets users see everything that was new on Facebook, chronologically.

However as the number of users on Facebook grows, a certain mechanism is needed to tame the rate of Facebook updates – hence their algorithm.

The side effect here is that the contents served to us are actually controlled by a machine. Facebook wants to change that by launching this “Why am I seeing this post?” tool.

This new tool is found under the top right corner of each post. Pressing that drop down menu, you can see a new option called “Why am I seeing this post?” and pressing it brings a new menu listing what and why you are seeing the post.

To put it in a more technical way, the “Why am I seeing this post?” virtually displays some of the main factors that the algorithm uses to decide if a certain post is to be displayed on your newsfeed or not.

Some of the factors that influence the post’s ranking are:

• How often they interact with posts from people, Pages or Groups
• How often they interact with a specific type of post (videos, photos, links)
• The popularity of the posts shared by the people, Pages and Groups they follow.

Under the “Why am I seeing this post?” also gives you shortcuts to See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts. These options provide the users (like you and me) more control over your newsfeed.

Another update was to the other similar feature that is called “Why am I seeing this ad?” that was launched a long time ago.

Similar to “Why am I seeing this post?”, we can now see the ranking factors of each ads – like its basic demographic details, interests and website visits contribute to the ads.

Now, Facebook also included additional details on the ad when the information on an advertiser’s list matches the user’s Facebook profile.

Businesses can reach their customers by uploading information they already have, such as emails or phone numbers.

Facebook then tries to match the ad to the most relevant audience without revealing any identifiable information back to the business.

“Why am I seeing this ad?” now provides details such as when the advertiser uploaded the information or if the advertiser worked with another marketing partner to run the ad.

The “Why am I seeing this ad?” feature is already available now. As for the “Why am I seeing this post?” feature, it will be rolling out globally starting from 17th May, and expected to be available for all users by the end of the month.

source: /nasilemaktech.com