NFO

Until a formula is put in place, NFO refers to the idea of convincing a Web site or social utility to display the feed items that your application publishes in your friends' news feeds.

News Feed Optimization is comparable to SEO, whereas NFM (News Feed Marketing) is akin to SEM. According to Justin Smith's article below, like Google's PageRank algorithms, Facebook's proprietary "feed rank" algorithms determine which feed items are shown to whom and which items are not. Also like Google's undisclosed PageRank algorithm, the variables that contribute to your feed item's feed rank are unknown to you (and everyone except Facebook). Finally, like companies dependent on their SEO'd Google PageRank, companies dependent on their NFO'd Facebook feed rank will experience similar trauma when the algorithm unpredictably or inexplicably changes.

Here's an example of it's usage as seen in the article "Facebook Debunked" by Kevin Barenblat: "NFO is the new SEO: News feeds that appear whenever users adds or interacts with an app are one of the most important marketing channels freely available on Facebook. Many applications count on news feeds to drive growth among the users' friends. However, activity among Facebook's 33M+ users (half of whom log in daily) generates trillions of news feed items. To provide the best user experience, Facebook culls those down to a digestible number of feed items it thinks will be most interesting to you. The result is that less than 0.2% of possible news feed items actually show up in feeds. And because news feeds are one of the best ways to reach out to users, expect a News Feed Optimization (NFO) industry to develop just like Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Read the article below for tips on designing high performance news feed items!