Don’t fear the algorithm

In our last post we talked about getting comfortable with Google’s search algorithm, but it’s important to keep in mind that Google isn’t the only game in town. Though Google remains the most popular destination on the internet, Facebook is a close second. Facebook users also spend much more time with the site per session than Google users. This makes Facebook a tremendously important channel for marketing your company and your website, and today I’m going to explain the basics of optimizing your content marketing strategy for Facebook’s news feed algorithm.

This algorithm decides, out of all the various activities on Facebook that could potentially be shown to users in their news feeds, what to show and in what order. So just as with optimizing for Google’s search algorithm, there are a few key principles that you can employ to make your social content rank more successfully. 

Affinity

Affinity is Facebook’s measure of how close the relationship is between the source of the content and any given user. Facebook measures affinity in two ways. First, users can simply tell Facebook what their affinity with another person is, by labeling the person a "family member," "close friend," or "acquaintance". If you thought that those labels were merely there for your convenience, rest assured that Facebook was paying attention. Second, Facebook observes how you behave. So for example if you routinely ignore updates from your brother, while frequently commenting on or otherwise interacting with updates from your grandmother, that is going to increase your affinity score with your grandmother as compared to your brother. This means that to raise your affinity score with your users, you should provide them content interesting enough to prompt them to comment or otherwise interact with it. If they simply glance at it in their news feed and move on, that’s not helping you out much in terms of ranking.

Weight

Continuing with the example scenario above, let’s say you posted a status update on Facebook. Your brother as well as several other people like this new update. At the same time your grandma posts a brand-new status update (she’s just won first prize for her apple pie at the county fair). Your grandma’s new status update is a more significant action than your brother merely liking yours, so it carries more weight when Facebook is deciding what to show in your feed. One of the implications then, if you want to market yourself on Facebook, is to put priority on posting your own content and status updates that might be interesting to your followers. Simply liking or leaving comments on other people’s status updates isn’t going to be as effective.

Decay

Decay in this context just refers to the gradually decreasing impact of any particular action with the passage of time. So for example maybe your crazy uncle’s ranking for your news feed goes down because you hide his latest post about some conspiracy theory. A year later the impact of that hide action will be less. Maybe you’ve come around to his crazy views, or maybe you just miss seeing posts from your uncle. At the same time, the positive impact of actions also fades with time. So your post about some popular trending topic in your industry might improve your ranking for a time, but that impact is also subject to decay. This means that an effective content strategy requires posting pretty regularly to maintain ranking with your audience.

Putting it all together

There are a number of other techniques you can use to optimize for the Facebook news algorithm, but the three basic principles outlined above should get you started. If you need more help with your social content marketing strategy, get in touch with us here at V.E.S. and we’ll be happy to assist you.