Confessions of an algorithm: Facebook and content.

Understanding how Facebook works is tough.

Their algorithms are updated constantly and it’s hard to keep track of every change.

However, I think it’s quite possible to formulate a couple of rules or laws by analyzing their changes through the years.

In this article, I’ll cover what makes you fall into Facebook’s good graces… and why you’re getting the cold shoulder sometimes.

The Inspiration

I’ve been following a small community called GrowthHackingIdea for quite some time. You get a daily or biweekly email in your inbox (depending if you are a VIP or free user) about case studies and experiments.

As with everything Marketing and Growth Hacking-related, most tips should be taken with a grain of salt.

However, I got really interested when they mentioned this case study from Buffer:

Here are some of the headline stats (of the results):

Reach has more than tripled from 44,000 to 150,000+ people per week on Facebook

Average daily engagements with our Facebook content has risen from ~500 to more than 1,000

More and more of our posts are reaching between 5,000–20,000 people (before we made the change, many of our posts were reaching less than 2,000 people)

It really got me wondering about what kind of magic they pulled off to turn all their metrics around.

The answer, however, was quite simple:

We  cut our posting frequency by more than 50% on Facebook and began to truly focus on  quality over quantity.

Well, that was not very exciting… It’s what we’ve been preaching for quite some time. Most of my chat with Joah Santos, founder of NYLON. agency, was precisely about marketers saturating their social channels with content.

His words:

You won’t increase brand sentiment if you are posting 45 updates on social media per month. Top brands people love like Nike and McDonalds are posting 3 times a month. It is highly unlikely that you are interesting enough to interrupt me 45 times. Worry about #brandlove not GRPs, CPMs, TOMs, and Engagement KPIs.

It seems, however, that Joah was underestimating the social media landscape since Buffer was posting 40 times… per week. And that’s just on Facebook:

A quick sift through our data shows that we were sharing more than  125 postsacross our social media channels (25–40 posts to  Facebook alone) on a weekly basis.

And the results for this hectic behavior:

The  more we posted to Facebook the less reach we received on each one of our posts. This graph shows the significant drop in reach during our peak posting times (~4 times per day around July/August, 2016):

The Laws of Facebook’s News Feed

With these numbers getting thrown around (and all the bad news about organic reach shrinking), I’ve got enough information to make some valuable predictions:

1. Don’t Divert Traffic from Facebook

This seems to be the big deal for quite some time and the cause of lost traffic and engagement for publishers and brands: link posts are penalized with less organic reach than other kinds of posts. They are especially important for businesses that require users to visit their website for monetization purposes.

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