Facebook’s New Algorithm
At the start of October in 2020, Facebook’s content algorithm changed. People began to see more diverse content on their feeds. The typical feed went from having a lot of posts from a few creators/friends to fewer posts from more creators and friends. Over the last three months, I’ve been looking at this change and figuring out how to adapt Facebook marketing strategies. Over 65% of Bhutan’s population is on Facebook, so Bhutanese businesses need to understand this algorithm and adapt their marketing guidelines.
The Golden Rule
First, let us understand what I call the Golden Rule of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any social media platform monetize the time users spend on their platform. The more time people spend online, the more ad spaces they can sell to their customers. So, it makes sense that platforms do their best to keep users engaged. It is why, although they were relentlessly mocked for copying their competitors, Twitter launched their stories feature a few months ago. Why wouldn’t they? Snapchat proved the feature was a hit. Instagram did the same. As did Facebook and even WhatsApp. If a feature has even the most marginal positive effect on how much time someone spends on an app, social media companies are willing to try it.
The most important part of their arsenal in the pursuit of the golden rule is the content algorithm. After all, it is content that keeps people coming back. Companies have tried many different ways to give people the content they want. Some, like Reddit, allow you to curate your own timeline. The idea is that you know what is most entertaining to you. On Reddit, you pick topics and communities and engage with the content in them. Others like Twitter rely on you picking the people you trust to give you good content. It is why the average Twitter feed is full of accounts you directly follow or those that the people you follow interact with.
Then there’s Facebook, which relies on a more complex algorithm. On Facebook, you form friendships, join groups, and follow pages. Your feed is filled with content from these sources. But because of how large the platform is, they needed ways of segregating engaging content from less engaging ones. They did this by assigning invisible scores (let’s call them “friendship scores”) based on your scrolling history. For every engagement you make with a page or person, your score with them rises. This is the score that determines who a “top fan” on a page is.
On the side of the content creator, Facebook rewards engaging posts by showing future posts to more people immediately and organically. On the side of the user, their feeds are filled with content from pages and people they have interacted with in the past. This was how Facebook’s algorithm worked up until October. And this is the algorithm that most marketing strategies are currently built on.
What Changed?
The October update did not do away with friendship scores. They are still present and working as before. What changed is how friendship scores affect your news feed. As I said above, in the past, you would be shown all kinds of content posted by the people and pages you have good scores with. This put an invisible limit on the number of unique creators (pages or friends) that would show up on your feed in a scrolling session. The October update did away with this limit. Now, you will find content from more unique creators, but to make up for space, they show fewer posts from each creator. There is a risk here though. As you increase the number of creators to show on a feed, you leave room for disappointing content that might not engage the audience well. In the older system, it was guaranteed that the posts users saw were engaging to them. In the new system, it isn’t guaranteed. To avert that risk, Facebook seems to have added a new part to its algorithm. This is the biggest change from before.
The Audition Period
It seems like any piece of content now has the ability to go “viral” or to get more than average engagements. Facebook measures how engaging the content is in the first few hours of posting. If engagement during this period is high, then the post remains on people’s feeds for longer. This means early attention is rewarded with sustained attention over a longer time. It also means that if a post does not get early attention, it is likely to not show up on people’s feeds. You might have noticed this in your personal Facebook experience in the last few months. Status updates with a lot of likes get sporadic likes every few days. While those that did not do well within the first few hours of posting do not get any attention after half a day.
Here’s how your marketing strategy needs to adapt. Early attention is important. So, time your posts for when the traffic is at its highest. I run a few busy accounts and find that for Bhutan, 11 AM-12 PM and 9 PM-12 AM are the best posting hours. These posting times make it likelier for your post to get early attention. Another strategy is to keep a small group of friends who will interact with your content as soon as it is posted. Create Facebook groups with others in the same city as you. When you share a post, send a link to that group. Members have to engage with that content. This will make the algorithm think your post is doing well, giving you the aforementioned benefits.
Facebook’s algorithm is ever-changing, so this will not always stay current. But they don’t often change their algorithm as radically as they did in October, so building a strategy off of this analysis should keep your marketing effective for a while. The most important thing to remember is the Golden Rule, and to design your content in a way that engages the audience. If your posts can keep people on the platform, Facebook will recognize and reward you.
