The Engine that drives Facebook – The Facebook Algorithm

Imagine you log into Facebook and go to your news feed to see what’s going on. You’re pretty social so let’s say you have around 1200 friends. Will everyone’s post show up? No, Facebook has a complex algorithm to decide what you want to see. Their goal is to keep you on FB and for people to stay active. For businesses that don’t understand this, their marketing strategy can be way off. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a presence on FB, but in the same way, FB is also a business and they make their money by keeping people online in their business.

Let’s look at the 3 things that make up the FB algorithm.

·         Affinity Score, How connected your page is to your fans. This is determined by how many likes, comments, and shares you get. Likes are the least weighted in the algorithm. This is the number one reason most Facebook marketing campaigns don’t realize as much profit as they should. People are focusing on getting likes to their page, without putting people into their sales funnel. I love working with recruiters and companies that offer a service or product that people really need. They need you and need help finding you! Converting people is not a dirty word, ethical business is win/win. Also understanding likes to the page are important because they show social proof and Facebook knows this, that’s why you’ll pay more for that good reputation. I believe people that like doing business with you will like your page, therefore my goal is to put likes to your page that will interact. Because comments and shares is how to explode your advertising campaigns.

·         Interaction Weight, everything we’re talking about today is individual. When I say interaction weight, it means each comment, like or share has a different amount of people that will see your post because of that action. Each person that interacts with you page will become more sticky and see more of your posts higher up in their news feed. That person then has people that are sticky to him and will see your post when he likes, comments or shares. The key point here is to build that stickiness, which rubs off on your business brand and becomes invaluable in creating lifetime customers. Likes are the least weighted followed by comments higher and shares being highest.

·         The last is simply Time Decay, as things get older on FB they die out. This includes profiles, business pages and post. So it’s very important to have a plan and stick to it, once a profile has died out, it gets harder to bring it back. It’s still good to keep the pages and consider making a new one and merging the new and old to kick some of the time decay.

Solution TIME! These above reasons are why not all of your friends or fan are seeing your posts and ads. If we understand this we can create an action plan to increase exposure and increase conversion.

1. Put less value on likes to your page and More Value to likes to your post.
2. Encourage engagement on your page, get people to invest in your page by asking for their opinion on how you can better serve them. (This is so powerful don’t be embarrassed to ask, it helps people invest in you)
3. Shares are KING!! Get people to share your post and then they for one are more connected to your page and will see more of your post. Also their friends have the opportunity to engage with your business.
4. Be personal, Introduce your team and give praise to good employees. Let people know how friendly you are.
5. Like other pages as your page so you can interact with other businesses and grow together. Cross promotion is very successful in small towns.

I hope you enjoyed this and will use some of these new ideas.