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Use of automation systems in business

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Business Automation image

In a society increasingly reliant on technology, more and more businesses are using some form of automation to alleviate their workload. Put simply, automation is the use of software to perform often complex tasks quickly and efficiently. Although business automation may seem daunting to the technologically challenged, there are many simple processes anyone could implement which could save you time and money. These tools are often inexpensive, easy to use and can sometimes function as an extra member of staff – without the salary!

Instead of spending the rest of the article detailing complex and often expensive types of business automation, I am going to give you some simple and straightforward examples which can be used by anyone, regardless of business type or budget.

E-mail Automation

One of the most common automation processes is the use of automatic e-mail. Are you out of the office for the day or unable to access your inbox? No problem! Simply set up an automatic reply the day before and contacts will receive an instant response to their message. Additionally, you can arrange automatic ‘thank you’ e-mails to customers who have made a purchase, payment reminders to others and set up a regular newsletter in advance. So, you could even plan an entire year’s worth of newsletter communication in one day!

Telephone Automation

One of the simplest forms of automation is the use of a telephone answering machine, ensuring you don’t miss any messages when out of the office or even if you’re busy on another call. Did you know you can also implement a ticket system, transcribing any answerphone messages into text documents which are instantly sent to your e-mail or mobile phone? You need never worry about missing an important call, and thus potential business, again; with automated systems such as this, you can make a promise to contact someone within 10 minutes of them leaving a message.

Social Media Automation

According to a recent survey, only 42% of small businesses are currently using social media, compared to a whopping 81% of larger companies. More small businesses should be taking advantage of the extra publicity and potential trade which comes with social media promotion. With the use of automation, this is becoming increasingly easier to do. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter allow for ‘scheduled posting’; messages and posts which can be planned up to a year in advance. You could spend less than a day organising an entire year’s worth of social media communication, almost certainly enhancing your brand’s identity. Not only does this process save time, it also ensures that you are regularly communicating with customers on weekends, evenings and other non-working hours. Additionally, it reduces the risk of human error. If you forget to regularly update your social media, automated services will take care of it for you, so can you really afford to miss out on this form of brand, product or service promotion?

Alternatively, if you do feel too overwhelmed with managing your own social media then you can always outsource it to someone who enjoys social media and the opportunity of engagement with existing clients or new prospects. For more information about our social media packages and offering see here

So as you can see these are some of the simplest forms of business automation. Of the examples above, all are entirely free, easy to implement, and guaranteed to make your working life a lot easier.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of carmelvision

How Small Businesses Have Evolved Over the Years

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Business evolution“How has small businesses evolved over the years?” I hear many people ask.  Not long ago some people would have been unaware that a company or business was operating in certain parts of the country or a small secluded village or town.  Keeping track of the best and most expanding business firms in your own Country or globally was difficult.  With the expansion of the internet and the world being more connected, even small businesses remain in the limelight.

The internet now plays a huge role for most businesses on a global scale with the increase of online marketing tools and consumer participation.  Email marketing has been an important tool over the past years for small businesses, but today this usage has increased alongside the use of social media marketing which has exploded if compared with five years ago.

There is also an increase of businesses using, or using more automated business solutions ie inventory, payroll etc

Even most households and individuals are now directly connected to the internet in one shape or form; you really don’t need to own a PC anymore in order to get connected!

A survey was completed a few years ago and showed that it was harder to run a business then than 5 years ago…

  • 55% said the economy has hit their business hard
  • 49% said it’s harder to keep pace with technology
  • 40% said there’s more direct competition

Only 12% of the respondents said that it was easier to run a business than it was five years ago, and of that group of small businesses, 89% citied online marketing tools that make it easier and less expensive to market their business.

The survey also showed an uptick in the importance of supporting local businesses with customers.

When asked whether they think being locally owned and operated is a major reason customers support their business today 51% of respondents said yes, up from the 42% who thought so five years ago.  Even a little private bakery that one wishes to open can sooner succeed with the right investment in marketing, service and product.

Businesses are now more connected and continue to expand their social circles both through online and offline networking which has increased and become more popular today with some small businesses sending representatives to networking functions weekly, fortnightly or more frequently.

Now, with just a few clicks your company or organization can go viral and with the click of a few photographs your work can be viewed and recognised.  With a simple press of the “Send” button, you can instantly get your message out there to a global audience and the opportunity to increase sales and expand your business.

 

 

 

 

Survey Source: Small Businesses: Then and Now Survey, Constant Contact, 2013

Picture courtesy of FlowCentric

Top social media platforms for businesses

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Today’s world is the world of technology that connects us faster than anything else. Some businesses who have utilised the web have reported booming sales & profits, so if you also aspire to join the ranks of web entrepreneurs who are making millions, the opportunities for online businesses are seemingly unlimited. Social networking sites have made the task simpler and easier to convert the fans, friends, followers and subscribers to dedicated customers. Social networking sites are a great way to promote your new or existing business. Creating back links to your website on your social media platforms is a useful way to gain a greater global audience and to encourage sales growth.

Social Media image

Being a web entrepreneur you know all the social media sites available today but the question that springs to mind is, which ones should you leverage? You may choose to use them all to promote your business but in reality if you run a small business, using all platforms is not a feasible option because it becomes difficult to invest the time needed. So, with your limited resources, which platform is best for you?

Select social media sites based on their best usability to your business:

Facebook: Facebook is a great “social utility” for your business.  On Facebook, you not only connect but also expand your network, so create your business page and share your business news & updates. Strong brands get a lot of active following, so if you have a strong brand value, Facebook may be the best option.  However, if you are a nascent player you’ll need to focus your efforts on to page promotion which will help you acquire new customers. The majority of new businesses use Facebook as their first social media platform, whereby maximum `likes’ are driven by pictures.  Studies show that more than 90% of `likes’ are derived from photos.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a professional B2B network site that helps you connect to other professionals and promote your business amongst groups. LinkedIn aims at career opportunities and is a good place for recruiters, whilst 91% of marketers use LinkedIn. Many business contacts are made daily on LinkedIn which results in it being the leading social media platform for B2B opportunities.

Pinterest: Pinterest is a trusted information and advice source for online customers whilst also enabling businesses to increase their sales by visual displays (pins). Many users on Pinterest are there to get shopping inspiration, and it has performed exceptionally well in shaping the mind set of shoppers to make purchases. You can use Pinterest to gain more customers by creating and sharing pins of interest. When individuals find something that they like on the web, they can `pin it’ to their Pinterest Board and access it anytime.  A lot of top brands use Pinterest to promote their products by way of visual demonstration.

Google+: If your customer acquisition strategy involves SEO, then Google Plus (Google+) is your stop.  The more +1’s you receive on your posts; the greater your chances to improve your search rankings. High-value brands use Google Plus actively as a part of their social media campaigns. So if you are serious about your Google ranking, you cannot afford to miss Google plus among your social media platforms.

Being new to social networking sites, you may wonder if marketing via social media is just a lot of hype. Will this actually make a difference or will anyone actually read your posts? Doubt certainly creeps in, and you wonder whether your business will grow or not? But don’t despair! Try giving a digital handshake to your potential customers. It will undoubtedly take time to build your audience on your social media platforms but with some thought & lots of dedication you’ll develop a strong and dedicated following and take your business towards success.  If you really don’t have the time to invest in this important aspect of your business then an easy solution would be to outsource this work to an affordable Virtual Assistant who can add value by providing remote business support without the red tape.

 

“Social media is important for your business, it helps you gain greater exposure.”

Facebook Looking to Reduce ‘Overly Promotional Posts’

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Facebook looking to reduce promotional postsAs a business owner you’re undoubtedly using Facebook as one of your main digital marketing mediums, but if you’re not, why not!? After all, it’s a fantastic place to engage with your customers and prospects and get a really personal feel for everything that people expect from you as a brand.

However, an announcement that appeared on the social network’s newsroom blog last Friday may have an impact on the amount of exposure your business page gets going forward.

Now Facebook algorithm updates are nothing new and are something we’ve come to expect. But this recent one looks set to have a greater effect on companies who have previously been using their brand pages for promotional purposes.

As part of their ongoing user experience improvement programme, Facebook are striving to make people’s newsfeeds full of more stuff they want to see and less stuff they don’t want to see. Some of the feedback they’ve apparently received from the Facebook community is that people don’t like posts from pages they’ve liked which come across as ‘overly promotional’.

The devil’s advocate in me though is slightly bemused by this revelation. Surely when a person likes a page, be it a business, celebrity or whatever, they are signing up to receive all future updates from that page, including ones that are promotional in nature.

Reading between the lines, rightly or wrongly, leads me to believe that Facebook may have an ulterior motive behind this change of scope. It figures that if ‘overly promotional’ posts will lose exposure, businesses will need to conduct paid advertising campaigns to continue their reach.

The social network, however, says that as a result of the change there will not be an increase in the amount of ads that people see. This begs the question as to what will fill the gaps that are left by the reduced number of liked page posts.

So what constitutes an ‘overly promotional’ post? Well according to Facebook its posts that coerce people into buying a product or installing an app; posts that push people to enter a competition with no real context; and posts that mimic paid ads on the site.

Posts like this:

Tiger therapy

Even though the change isn’t due to take effect until January 2015, it’s definitely food for thought for businesses that utilize Facebook to engage with their followers.

So what should you do going forward?

Well one area that still proves to perform well on Facebook is native video. In fact, native videos get some 1 billion views a day! When we say ‘native video’ we’re referring to videos that have been created solely for and published directly to Facebook, and not simply links to stuff on YouTube.

Therefore, if you’re concerned about the impending promotional page decline, but not sure if you want to embark on a paid advertising campaign, why not experiment with native video? Of course, there’s no guarantee that it won’t also be subject to an algorithm change in the future, but at least for now it’s a pretty safe bet.

Twitter and IBM to enable businesses to effectively mine social data

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Twitter & IBM to enable businesses to effectively mine social dataStop for a minute and think about the amount of data that passes through Twitter every single hour. Then multiply that by the amount of hours in a day, a week, a month etc and try to comprehend how much social data Twitter actually possesses. To aid your thought process or maybe just blow your mind, 500 million tweets are sent via the platform every day.

So it’s safe to say that Twitter holds tonnes of data. And now, in a recent announcement made on the company’s blog, it seems that businesses may get the opportunity to mine that data going forward.

Every day, people share a piece of their lives via Twitter. Whether it’s their lunch plans, a cute picture of a pet or a special occasion, Twitter inevitably knows about it. Moreover, every single one of those tweets holds value.

But accessing Twitter data itself isn’t something revolutionary. After all listening tools have been around for a while and give businesses direct access to the metrics. However, until now there has been a challenge when it comes to actually deciphering the data and turning it into something tangible that businesses can leverage.

Twitter and IBM’s new partnership will effectively allow businesses to utilise Twitter data as part of their decision-making processes through a variety of IBM tools, solutions and services. Heard of IBM’s cognitive supercomputer Watson?  Well it could potentially have access to Twitter data in the future and allow companies to answer such questions as, “What do our customers like best about our service?” or “Why are we growing so fast in Asia?”

With access to such insightful data, businesses will be able to unlock previously hidden realms and shape their customer experiences more intuitively. This will allow products and services to be targeted at specific customer needs and wants.

Tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants will be trained on how businesses can best apply Twitter data in their day-to-day operations.

This announcement is fantastic news for companies who are already using social media channels to their advantage and engaging with their customers on as many levels as possible. Just imagine the scope of engagement that will be possible in the future.

Social media marketing requires your business to listen. In fact, that’s probably the primary activity you should be doing across all your social channels. But how can you listen effectively if you’re relying on memory as much as anything else?

Utilising social data is more than just checking how many followers you’ve got. It’s about building a picture of your audience; understanding what makes them tick; and creating material that is relevant.

The collaborative force of Twitter and IBM represents a turning point in social data manipulation. One that will allow businesses to take value from every piece of micro content that’s available.

 

How to Achieve a Better Work-Life Balance

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How to acheive a better work-life balanceToday, we’re more connected than we’ve ever been. What with laptops, smartphones and tablets padding our bags, there’s never been a better time to be a remote worker. Add to this the profusion of tools and applications, like Dropbox, Gmail and Skype – all of which put our vital files and messages within arm’s reach wherever we are – and you can see why the lines between work and life are more blurred than ever.

As a mother, wife and professional virtual assistant, I often find myself working when I perhaps shouldn’t be. Not because I can’t manage my time – I can do that standing on my head – but instead because I’m always attentive to my clients’ needs. For example, if I get an email in the evening from one of my clients asking me for some out of hour’s assistance, I’ll more often than not oblige.

An article I recently read on the Huffington Post really got me thinking about work-life balance and was ultimately the inspiration for this post.

So how can you start achieving a better work-life balance today? Here are my top tips:

Hire a Virtual Assistant

Oh come on, don’t look so surprised – it was always going to be on this list. Not because it’s my livelihood, but rather that I genuinely believe in the real value that most Virtual Assistants afford for their clients.

Hiring a virtual assistant is something you should absolutely consider if you find yourself spending too much time on the mundane tasks and not enough time enjoying the fruits of your labour.

Virtual Assistants like myself can help people like you get back to doing what you do best – growing your business.

Scrutinize your workload

Time is our most valuable commodity and we can’t simply buy more of it. That’s why you need to ensure that you are using every minute of yours in the most productive way possible.

Scrutinize every task you carry out and decide if they all add real value. The ones that don’t should be offloaded to someone else, either internally or externally.

Learn to switch off

What I’m referring to here is your multitude of devices. The gadgets that make you constantly contactable both day and night are the things that make you super-efficient, yet inevitably destroy a small part of your balance.

Simple things like turning your smartphone off during dinner or if you’re on holiday, leaving your tablet in the hotel room and not taking it to the swimming pool. Out of sight really is out of mind, right?

Respect your self-imposed boundaries

You’ll never realise a better work-life balance if you cannot learn to respect your own boundaries. As with any change it will seem slightly alien in the beginning but you will learn to embrace going forward.

Routines are a great way to teach yourself, to adopt different ways of working. You almost want your boundaries to become habits. Unwritten rules that you don’t even need to think about because they come so naturally.

If you don’t respect your own boundaries then other people definitely won’t…

Pinterest & Snapchat Offer two Fresh Advertising Platforms for your Brand

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We all know that having an active social media presence serves to promote your business and allows you to engage with your customers and prospects. But while Facebook and Twitter are often the two social networks that get the most attention from brands, Pinterest and Snapchat have introduced paid advertising offerings that provide different angles for your business to leverage.

Pinterest & Snapchat Offer two Fresh Advertising Platforms for your Brand

Introducing Pinterest promoted pins

Pinterest is rather unique in that it’s a highly visual social network which allows users to create stunning visual collections (boards). However, Pinterest is often overlooked by brands but why? After all, at the last count Pinterest boasts more than 70 million users. Furthermore, the majority of its user base are women – some 80% in fact.

Therefore, if your business/brand uses a lot of visual content and your target audience are predominantly women, Pinterest could represent a great opportunity for you. Plus, with the announcement of promoted pins, there has never been a better time to get interested in Pinterest or Pinterested! (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Promoted pins are Pinterest’s paid advertising offering and operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. They allow you to promote specific pins based on set criteria that you stipulate. For example, you can choose to target certain demographics, specific locations and even different types of devices.

The best part is that you only pay when somebody actually clicks through to your website from your promoted pin. There’s also no need to worry about spiraling advertising costs as you are able to set daily budgets and duration for every campaign.

There are, of course, a number of rules that advertisers must follow, but these are run-of-the-mill and to be expected.

Promoted pins are still in beta and currently only available to select US-based businesses. However, it’s inevitable that they’ll be rolled out across the board in the future and will present another advertising platform for your business utilize.

Snapchat Advertising is upon us

Ephemeral messaging application Snapchat may not seem like a lucrative platform to focus your marketing efforts on, but don’t dismiss it just yet. Especially as, the start-up – which has been valued at $10 billion has now opened up its gates to advertisers.

With some 100 million active monthly users – 71% of who are under 25 – Snapchat presents quite an opportunity for brands who want to get their marketing in front of millenials (that’s generation Y for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term).

The announcement that Snapchat would start rolling out paid ads was made on its blog last week. The company said that US-based users would see an advertisement over the weekend and judging by the online buzz that definitely was the case.

Snapchat wanted to emphasis that its ad offering would not detract from the user experience that people have come to love using its app. Ads will only appear in the Recent Updates section and never in personal communications (chats).

Snapchat’s decision to roll out paid ads shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, they need to justify their huge price tag and the company’s own blog post states that their reason is simply to make money.

However, they further added: “We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted”. A statement that’s quite ironic considering that the first ad to be displayed was for Ouija – a horror movie by Universal Pictures.

Pinterest’s promoted pins and Snapchat’s paid advertising may not yet be available to UK businesses but they almost certainly will be. Will you be utilizing them?

Introducing WEST by Box, Facebook and Pinterest

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Introducing WEST

Last week, the Facebook Newsroom announced a new initiative that the social network has launched in conjunction with Box and Pinterest. WEST, as its known, stands for Women Entering and Staying in Tech and, in my mind, is a fantastic program.

When it comes to Computer Science, there has long been a gender gap in the industry, both in workforce’s across the globe and in the educational pipelines where tomorrow’s generation of Computer Scientists will emerge.

In fact, the United States Census Bureau has reported that technical roles in the country will continue to increase and are expected to reach 1.4 million by 2020. However, the number of women filling these positions has been steadily declining since the 1990s.

That’s why Facebook, Pinterest and Box have teamed up to create WEST, a one-on-one mentorship program that is designed to help more women adopt and ultimately flourish in these types of technical role.

The aim is to bring together highly experienced women from the top technology companies across the industry to help build and maintain a focussed mentorship program. It will be driven by the day-to-day work that these individuals do and geared towards the exciting technical opportunities that are becoming available.

Opening in 2015, WEST will be looking to attract female mentees in their early to middle career stages. It will feature a series of 1:1 and group interactions face-to-face, as well as online sessions over the course of a year.

Initially, the program will be open to women in the Bay Area in the U.S. but if it proves successful then we can hope to see an expansion going forward. I for one, hope that UK women will be able to take advantage of this great initiative in the future.

Mentorship is something that is very powerful and can help shape an individual’s life including their career choices, lifestyle outcomes and overall success.

Influential individuals, like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, have long voiced their opinions about the need for more women in technical roles. The Facebook COO famously said in an interview with 60 Minutes that, “A man and a man at a bar at a hotel during a work trip – that looks like mentoring. A man and a woman at a bar at a hotel on a work trip, that doesn’t look like mentoring to anyone.”

It speaks volumes that three huge companies, like Facebook, Box and Pinterest, have decided to undertake this venture. They obviously want to tackle a problem that has been developing for some time. Hopefully, their lead will make other businesses take note and perhaps even offer similar programs.

When industry giants make a decision to create a bespoke mentoring program for women from the ground up, it can only lead to more diversity in the technical industry as a whole going forward.

You can find out a little more about WEST here. There’s even an application form but unless you live in the Bay Area in the United States it’s obsolete at present.

What’s your view on WEST? Should women be given a helping hand with mentorship programs like this or will doing so ultimately put men at a disadvantage?

I’d love to hear your thoughts below…

Fake “Likes” are now on Facebook’s radar

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Fake Likes are now on FB radar

Facebook recently announced on their business blog that they are now taking a much firmer stance against fake activity; especially fake likes. Therefore, if your business has ever bought likes or is thinking of buying some, my advice is – absolutely don’t.

To understand the issue with fake likes, we need to first look at the purpose of genuine likes and the value they bring. When someone likes your business page it creates a connection between them and your brand. Any future updates you post are likely to appear in that user’s news feed, giving you a channel through which to communicate.

Over time, you can build relationships with your followers by providing them with useful and informative posts. If these posts strike the right chord, there is a strong chance your followers will in turn re-share them, thus boosting your brand’s reach even further.

With established relationships in place and engaged followers, your brand is in the best possible position to pitch potential sales via social media channels. You cannot do this if all the likes your page has are fake.

But if fake likes serve no purpose, why do people buy them?

The simple answer is to make their business appear more popular than it actually is and the businesses who tend to do this are just starting out on their social media journeys.

Fake likes can also prevent genuine followers from seeing your updates, which is disastrous for your online marketing efforts.

The reality is that the only people who benefit from fake likes are the ones who sell them. It’s no wonder then that Facebook are now taking a much tougher stance on this practice – which is essentially spam.

Using their sophisticated rules and machine learning, the social networking giant are constantly looking to identify suspicious behaviour. When they do, they undertake all means necessary to eliminate it. This may involve blocking associated accounts and removing all fake likes instantly.

Therefore, if you’ve paid for fake likes, they are very likely to be removed in the future without warning. Imagine how it will look when your business page’s followers take an overnight nosedive.

It’s not just technical measures, however, that Facebook use to combat spam on their platform. According to their blog post, the social network “have obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers” – something that might make people who sell likes think twice about in the future.

Furthermore, Facebook now also limit the amount of likes that accounts can give and sometimes ask for additional verification, limiting the spammers’ overall effectiveness.

When you first start building your online presence it can be tempting to try and boost your perceived popularity. However, this will not benefit you in the long-run and may even come back to bite you.

Remember that the purpose of your social media marketing campaigns is to build relationships with your customers and nurture them through to fruition. Fake likes may make you seem like a successful business but you’re only kidding yourselves.

Create content that is fresh and resonates with your audience. Genuine likes and shares will soon follow and your business will benefit from a much more responsive follower base.

Announcing three new Facebook improvements

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Announcing 3 new Facebook improvementsIt seems that Facebook have been doing some listening recently. That in itself is nothing new, as social networks are always striving to improve the user experience. However, Facebook haven’t just listened. They’ve actually acted too.

In fact, over the past few weeks the Facebook News Room have announced three important changes that are designed to improve the social networking experience for their users going forward.

Each change could have warranted a write up of its own, but I actually thought it better to bundle them into one post that serves as a single point of reference.

The changes are also outlined in the order that they appeared on the Facebook News Room and I’ve included a link to each original story for further reference purposes.

Click-bait articles now being suppressed

You may or may not be familiar with the term ‘click-bait’ but once I explain what it is you will undoubtedly recall seeing it on your internet travels.

Click-bait articles are those stories you see with a really eye-catching headline that is designed to stir your suspicious nature and make you click. But while these headlines are alluring, they tend to not give much away in terms of the article’s actual content.

This is click-bait and Facebook don’t like it one bit:

Click bait

Going forward, Facebook are going to weed out this type of low-quality, spam-style story so that more pertinent updates from friends and liked pages appear in people’s news feeds.

Facebook will reduce the number of click-bait articles that appear on their site in two ways.

First, they will track the amount of time a user spends reading an article before bouncing back to Facebook. Their thinking is that low-quality articles will have a faster bounce rate than higher quality pieces.

Second, Facebook will analyse the ratio of people clicking VS the number of shares or likes an article gets. If something attracts a lot of clicks but few shares/likes, then it’s likely to be click-bait.

Original story: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/

A better ad experience

Advertising on Facebook is huge business and when someone is presented with an ad that appeals to them, it makes for a better experience all-round. Likewise, marketers who manage to get their ads in front of people who they appeal to, will see their efforts reap greater rewards.

Previously, hiding an irrelevant ad on Facebook was a simple one-click affair:

Irrelevant ad on Facebook example

Going forward, however, Facebook are going to start asking people why they chose to hide a particular ad.

For example, if someone hides an ad and states their reason for doing so as being ‘offensive’ then there’s a strong chance that that ad will be found offensive by other people too and so shouldn’t be shown.

As well as collecting the reason, Facebook are going to also start paying more attention to those people who rarely hide ads. This is because Facebook deem the signal sent from these infrequent hiders to be much stronger and therefore carry more weight across the ad network.

Original story: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/09/news-feed-fyi-listening-to-peoples-feedback-to-show-better-ads/

More timely stories to surface

Facebook have come to realise that sometimes posts from friends and liked pages are more significant at certain times and less so at others. For example, during a live sports game or latest episode of a TV series, relevant updates need to appear in a timely manner. Once the event is over, however, those posts inevitably lose a lot of their significance.

FB Trending topics

It appears that trending topics are going to play a larger role in the future and Facebook will look to promote posts that relate to trending stories, so that they appear higher in people’s news feeds. This will ensure that any updates about a current hot topic are more likely to find their way to the top of news feeds.

Also, Facebook will look at the comments and likes that a post gets, paying specific attention to when these occur. They believe that a post which is fervently liked and shared soon after it has been displayed but then drops off a bit later, is more likely to be relevant when it was posted.

Posts like this will appear high up in news feeds to start with before gradually falling away as their relevance decreases.

Original story: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/09/news-feed-fyi-showing-more-timely-stories-from-friends-and-pages/