When you view someone’s Facebook profile, there are six friend thumbnails that appear near the top of the page. These six friends are selected by Facebook’s algorithm to give you a quick snapshot of who that person is connected to. There are a few factors that go into determining which six friends appear:
Mutual Friends
Facebook will prioritize showing you mutual friends that you and the profile owner share. Seeing familiar faces helps give context about your connection to the person and reinforces that you have friends in common.
Most Frequently Interacted With
The algorithm also considers how often the profile owner interacts with each friend. Those they exchange the most likes, comments, and messages with will be more likely to show up. These close connections say a lot about who is important in that person’s life.
Recently Active Friends
More recent activity also plays a role in selecting the six friends. People the profile owner has exchanged likes and comments with most recently have a greater chance of appearing. This recency factor helps surface the friends they are engaging with currently.
Other Factors That May Influence Selection
In addition to those main criteria, there are a few other things that can sway which friends show up in the top six:
Photos Together
If the profile owner is tagged in photos on Facebook with certain friends, they are more likely to be featured. Shared photos indicate a stronger real-life connection.
Educational Networks
If the profile owner attended the same school or is in the same class year as some friends, those relationships may take priority. These school connections often represent significant relationships.
Post Activity
Friends who have liked, commented on, or shared the profile owner’s posts recently may appear as well. This shows who is actively engaging with that person’s content.
Keyword Matches
If any friends have names, hometowns, employers, or other keywords that match terms on the profile, they may be selected. Keyword matching helps surface relevant connections.
Why Facebook Chooses These Friends
Facebook specially selects these six friends for a few key reasons:
Give Context About Relationships
Seeing mutual friends, close friends, school friends, and recent connections provides useful context about how the profile owner knows different people. It gives you an idea of their social circles.
Show Active Relationships
Displaying frequently interacting and recently active friends indicates who currently has a close relationship with the profile owner. It provides a snapshot of their social life right now.
Reinforce Common Connections
Highlighting mutual friends reminds you of connections you share with the profile owner. This strengthens your sense of common ground.
Encourage Further Engagement
Seeing friends you also know can spark you to reach out and connect further. It may prompt engagement such as sending a friend request or posting a comment.
Represent Diverse Relationships
Using different criteria allows Facebook to showcase a cross-section of the profile owner’s social connections from different contexts. This diversity gives broader insight into their relationships.
Behind the Scenes: How the Algorithm Works
Facebook designed the specialized algorithm that selects the top six friends. Here is a look at how it works behind the scenes:
Analyze Interactions and Connections
The algorithm looks at the profile owner’s friend list and analyzes the interactions, connections, photos, networks, keywords, and other data signals for each friend.
Score Each Potential Friend
It calculates engagement and relevance scores for each friend using the analyzed data. Friends receive higher scores based on mutual friends, recency, frequency, photos, school networks, keywords, and other weighted factors.
Rank Friends by Relevance
The algorithm ranks all the profile owner’s friends in order from highest to lowest score. The top scoring friends are those most relevant to the profile viewer.
Apply Additional Rules and Checks
Further rules are applied to fine-tune the selections – such as limits on how many of the same network can appear and cross-checks for inappropriate or misleading connections.
Select Top Six
Finally, the top six highest ranking friends that meet all criteria and pass the checks are chosen to display in the profile’s top friends area.
Recalculate Regularly
The algorithm runs periodically to re-analyze the latest interactions and recreate the ranked list of friends for optimal relevance. The top six are updated over time.
Optimization Over Time
Facebook is constantly tweaking and refining the algorithm to improve the relevance of the selected top friends. Here are some of the ways they are optimizing it:
Weight the Factors
The importance of factors like mutual friends, recency, and photos are adjusted to fine-tune the impact each has on friend selection. Factors more predictive of closeness may get higher weights.
Expand Data Signals
Additional data like groups, events, posts, and messenger connections helps paint a more nuanced picture of connections to incorporate into the algorithm.
Use Machine Learning
Machine learning trains the algorithm on patterns in connections and interactions among billions of Facebook relationships. This improves its ability to predict which friends will be most relevant.
Incorporate User Feedback
User surveys and feedback provides insight into which types of friends people find most interesting to see. This allows Facebook to tune the algorithm based on real user opinions.
Personalize the Selections
In the future, Facebook may be able to generate more personalized friend selections tailored to interests and connections of each profile viewer. This adds an extra layer of relevant social context.
Conclusion
Facebook’s top friends algorithm works behind the scenes to analyze interactions and connections to curate a shortlist that gives context about a person. Mutual friends, frequently interacting friends, recently active friends and those with photos, networks, keywords and high engagement are prioritized. The algorithm uses data signals and machine learning to optimize relevance over time. While the selections are currently the same for all viewers, Facebook may eventually be able to display different top friends personalized for each profile visitor.