Top Takeaways about Facebook’s algorithm from the Social Media Marketing Podcast

Last week, social media giant David Yu deftly spilled his thoughts about the Facebook algorithm on the Social Media Marketing podcast (go ahead and listen here).

There are some easy takeaways for everyone exploring how to:

1. Find organic reach on Facebook
2. Learn about Facebook ads and targeting

I put together my crib notes to help you find the most useful content quickly.

Jessica’s Sum-up:

Great content is the basis for both paid and organic Facebook reach. This is not a platform for sales; it’s a platform to try to be engaging for long periods of time, keep people inside Facebook viewing and reading your content, and offer value – not ask for web clicks or sales. This will increase all future posts, your trust factor, and yes, eventually, sales.

Problem:

The algorithm is stopping organic reach. Companies often feel they're being forced o pay for reach on Facebook and are looking for ways to improve organic reach through great content and understanding the algorithm.

The algorithm is now looking at:

How long people are watching videos, clickback rates. It is not rewarding fast and disinterested content "liking" but longer views and more meaningful comments and shares.

It is currently a “rich get richer” system where you want a couple of hot posts rather than many lower-ranked posts. “Hits” are increasingly rewarded with engagement. “Misses” threaten your relevancy score so nothing in the future will be a “hit.”

We need to understand differences in algorithms for organic posts and for paid ads.

Organic Posts

1.    How much engagement you get with your existing audience immediately counts to boost engagement all day long.

a.    Anything counts as engagement -- likes, comments, and shares can all be important

b.    Stories: sometimes you see stories because others liked them, even when you're outside the existing audience. This is one way that garnering likes gets you increased reach.

c.     “Consumption” can also count as engagement: Consumption is when you do something that doesn’t drive a story – but you’ve done something. You’ve clicked, watched a video, etc.  Consumptions drive what FB knows we do, even if it’s not on our feed and leaves no trail. This is still engagement that drives the algorithm.

d.    Different engagements are worth different weights. For examples, likes can be worth something close to one point, comments may be around 6, shares are 13, views are ? point, and negative feedback like hiding a story: -100. These vary slightly but you can calculate your “edgerank”: the power of each post using these numbers. Highest edgerank posts are likely to be video. Download post insights and you will know what’s working well. Shares, reviews, and check-ins are all comparable and positive. 

e.    Video: Clicking like (which takes all of 2 seconds) versus watching a video for a whole minute are not comparable when calculating engagement. The more sophisticated the algorithm gets, longer engagements are valued more (the average view time on FB is 6 seconds).

f.     “Is it sharable” is part of what Facebook values, since their goal is to keep users on Facebook longer. Here's an example: one bullying video went viral, was shared on George Takei, Ellen, and other big accounts. The signals were really high (it had an average of 56 seconds worth of view time, which is one way of assessing engagement). The like/share/comment metric was very high. If shares exceeds likes, you can tell the content has viral possibility. Facebook takes that signal into account. So should marketers. Boost content like this for the highest amplified engagement.

g.    More on negative feedback: It can turn into a downward spiral. Low reach and low feedback means your next post is dead before it posts, since Facebook will guess that your content is not very valued or valuable. Less and less reach means you should resist the urge to post more. Further poor performing posts will simply exacerbate the problem and teach the Facebook algorithm that you're not very good at content and shouldn't be seen.

You’ll get less reach and you’ll come to the conclusion Facebook just wants you to pay to reach your audience. Instead, look at what’s causing your negative feedback. Use Excel and download the post insights that are available. Find out where your highest positive score is. It will probably be:

                                                       i.    Video

                                                      ii.    Short video

                                                    iii.    Not asking for a buy

                                                    iv.    Storytelling

                                                      v.    Keeps people engaged longer

                                                    vi.    Is more shareable

Share factor: is this interesting to other people?

When Facebook is trying to figure out what you like, it doesn't just look at your activity. It looks at your 1,000 friends, but especially closer ones. You probably value a lot of the same things as your closest friends. This is called “collaborative filtering” and is part of the algorithm.

 This means if you have a niche and a small, dedicated community and you’re getting talked about in a non-spammy way, Facebook will love you.

It’s the same algorithm idea as the look-alike audience.

Decay factor: how much is the interest divided over time?

Decay is getting higher as the filter power increases and things fall off the feed faster. You can “trick” it by commenting on the original post when you get “Remember this day?” Continue to comment on old posts for a small renewal of those posts.

Therefore mix old things in with your publishing schedule.

Therefore create and share evergreen content.

Don’t just re-post old stuff without new stuff.

Boosting:

Boost hot posts only (Videos with long watch times or content with lots of shares).

Boost this content to 2 types of audiences:

1. People who we think would see it if we had more power. 
2. Influencers and media, in a strategy called inception. 

Boosting video drives more people whether or not you have any call to action. It has secondary effects: more email opens, more actions on website. Direct mail marketers often do not understand this effect. An organization can really benefit in many areas by boosting great content posts with no underlying CTA. And this may be a more successful strategy. Boosting your CTA posts may, in fact, harm the organization by creating a low relevance score that impacts reach but also the reach of future posts. Don’t send your audience to the website, or escalate your engagement yet unless they’ve already been there. Otherwise you'll risk negative feedback, which means lower reach and lower success.

Other tips:

Time of day does matter but you need to test for your specific audience. Tricking the algorithm, like posting at 3:00 a.m., no longer works. Boosting and evergreen content does work, so time of posting matters less than it used to. Your ultimate goal is that valuable posts last forever.

Paid Advertising Algorithm

Guess what? The paid Facebook algorithm is the same algorithm as free content, but you get more data on what's working in your posts (relevant scores = 6 at top of funnel, 2 at bottom of funnel are good scores)

Relevant score is the best diagnostic for improving an organization's reach, even if they don't want to use paid reach. It will show:

                                              i.    Positive feedback

                                             ii.    Negative feedback

                                           iii.    Other factors of what we’re clicking on

Audience engagement may very well intersect with people who have been to your website. These visitors can be excluded in targeting. Alternatively, they can be included. These sequences aren’t possible organically, so paid can help you do organic. You will learn by using the paid tools. Go to the ads tool for best organic data, even if you’re not running ads.

Demographics on the ads side will help you teach the algorithm as well. If you are in a small niche, it already knows who your best fans are. So use the defaults and let the algorithm wok for you. Don’t exclude people thinking you know what you’re doing.

Takeaways for marketing companies:

Anything that is not plain old conversion-centric can be boosted when it’s hot. Boost with low amount of money, say a dollar per day, and let the algorithm tell you what kind of content is working best.

Additional reach and sharing, is not counting against your organic reach. So when someone shares a boosted post, and their friends click through, it's as if they've clicked on an organic user post. Therefore, you’ll get higher organic reach on these posts that you won't have to pay for.

If you do a good job organically, and boosted posts get a lot of shares, those will not show up in paid analytics. 

Congrats! This is your goal.

The podcast has a few great examples you may want to digest as you think about your own content strategy on Facebook, so be sure to listen to it in its entirety if you're working toward DIYing Facebook organic strategy for your organization.

We try to use organic growth before we try paid solutions, but this podcast was really helpful to me. It offers some great ways to 1. have paid traffic in mind even when working on organic strategy and 2. Mix in paid traffic in a natural way to help augment your original strategy. It's not expensive and it's not intimidating to small companies and start-ups. These are good issues to keep in mind as you grow your community.