Understanding The Facebook Algorithm

FB algorithm

Quick Facebook Statistics

  • People spend more than a combined 640 million minutes on Facebook each month
  • There are currently over 54,200,000 business pages on Facebook
  • There are over 3 million links shared every hour on Facebook

What’s big about the News Feed?

Each time you bring up your Facebook News Feed, on average there are 1,500 potential stories you could view. The average Facebook user ends up only viewing about 300 of those posts each day. So how does Facebook determine which posts you see first? 

Facebook published a ‘News Feed FYI’ back in 2013 to help us understand their determinants a bit better. Facebook stated, “The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them.”

The News Feed algorithm initially had an organic reach that focused on variables like:

  • Interest shown in the post creator’s activity or their profile
  • Amount of likes and shares the post receives
  • The post type (video, link, photo, status..) and how much you have interacted with that type of post in the past

Facebook’s software has grown to be a powerful engine that generates a high amount of personal information useful to personalize any sort of marketing by publishers, brands, and other influencers. They continued to develop the algorithm that would work to many businesses advantage. In December 2013 Facebook stated, “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.” The algorithm that determined what shows up on the news feed would focus on far more personal variables and less on whether the post had many likes. Basically, with the algorithm evolving, brands that had built up a very high following now would have to spend more and more money to reach their followers.

The algorithm not only takes into account the amount of attention a post receives, but also reviews the content and determines if a post could possibly be a big life event for that user to see. The algorithm variables are made up depending on who the user interacts with most, the type of posts they tend to like, and whether they interact with a post. Facebook even notes whether you liked a link before or after you clicked on it.

What does this mean for your business?

Users want to see content that is part of their personal life, about their friends, and big life moments that are meaningful to them. From data Facebook retrieved from its users, they found that people are tired of promotional content. Most of the promotional content they were seeing wasn’t from ads but from pages they followed. If you have a Facebook page for your business, think about what sort of content people want to see. Overwhelming them with products and deals may actually send them running, but instead share some inspiration for the work week or a tip from your industry.

Although Facebook continues to make improvements and develop the algorithm to which stories appear on the news feed, their changes do not affect paid content. This may be helpful to keep in mind when you want to reach a new market of viewers. Whether you are trying to reach out to new clients or make known an event or workshop, it might be worth it to spend a few dollars and get your news seen. If you would like to promote your business content through sponsored Facebook ads but don’t know where to start, contact us at Cloud Clicks. We have helped many of our clients with social media presence.

Article inspired by these Sources:

https://www.singlegrain.com/facebook-news-feed/facebooks-news-feed-algorithm/

http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/

http://time.com/3950525/facebook-news-feed-algorithm/

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