It used to be called EdgeRank, today more simply they call it “Facebook algorithm”. What is it? It is a set of over 100 thousand factors that, evaluated all together, make Facebook decide whether or not to show a post to my friends on Facebook or, in the case of pages, to my fans.
Yes, because every post that is posted is not shown to all the friends of the poster nor to all the fans of a page. Why? Simply because it would be impossible! On average, according to Facebook, there are 1500 posts from our friends or pages that we follow that could be shown to us every time we access our account. It goes by itself that this is too much content: who has time to read 1500 posts every time they access Facebook? Nobody. For this reason, the algorithm that regulates Facebook makes a choice for us and decides to show us only the posts that are most likely to interest us. This is not a favor that the social of the good Zuck does to users: Facebook in fact has every interest in showing its users the content that is most interesting to them. In this way, users will stay longer on its platform and will continue to be an advertising target for paid ads. Logical, isn’t it? The more public I have online, the more paid ads are seen, the more I get paid.
But how does Facebook decide what content I might be interested in? This is where the algorithm comes into play, that is, a formula that takes into account many factors and evaluates them to decide which posts are most likely to attract our attention. The factors that come into play, as mentioned, are over 100 thousand and are not all known. What we know, is that there are some cornerstones driving Facebook’s decision. The three main factors that come into play are: affinity, weight and time decay.
The affinity between two users or between a page and a user is calculated based on the number of interactions between the two. The more a user has interactions with my page (commenting, leaving likes, reactions, and sharing published content), the more likely Facebook is to continue to show to that user posts from my page.
The weight of a post depends on the “success” it collects. A post with more likes, comments, and shares is more likely to be seen than a post that no one commented on and without likes. That’s why it’s important that fans on my page are really interested in what I say while it doesn’t make sense to pick up likes with the sole purpose of increasing a number (and of course it makes even less sense to buy likes, a practice that is fortunately disappearing from the web, and for great reasons). A page with 1000 active and interested fans, who comment and interact with the posts published could easily be more read and more useful for those who opened it than a 10,000-like page, where however no one leaves comments or reactions to posts, because slowly Facebook will simply stop showing posts on that page to an increasing number of people. Liking a page just because it’s a friend’s page, without us really interested in its services also amounts to distorting all the statistics related to post engagement, which will always be lower than it would be if the page only had fans really interested in what they say there (of course to do this must be more than one like obtained without real interest).
Finally, time decay is also a factor that depends very much on weight. As we know on Facebook, posts are shown on our boards in chronological order: we first see the most recent posts and then, scrolling down, we see the previous ones. The result is that those who access Facebook rarely risk missing out on some relevant posts. That’s why “Story Bumping” was introduced in 2013: not only the most recent stories are shown, but priority is given to recent stories not yet seen by the user, as long as they have a significant weight. Facebook itself said that with this new change the percentage of posts read has gone from 57% to 70%.
In short: if a post has been very successful, it is likely that my audience will see it on its board even many hours after its publication, if instead it does not collect likes, reactions, shares or comments will disappear shortly from the feed.
This excellent infographic by Glisco Marketing sums up the situation well, also giving a few more details:
