The algorithm helps make sense of the huge number of posts that people and businesses share everyday and chooses which ones to show in our News Feeds. The goal of News Feed is to show people the most relevant stories through a few determining factors.
The newsfeed heirarchy:
- Friends and family come first: The main objective of the News Feed is to connect people with their friends and family. So posts from loved ones are prioritised.
- Entertainment value: Second to maintaining friendships, Facebook found that people want their feed to inform and entertain them.
- Authentic communications: Prioritising genuine stories over misleading, sensational and spammy ones.
- You control your experience: Individuals know themselves best. So Facebook creates features (such as unfollow and see first) to let people customise their experience.
Facebook loves posts that:
- Are gaining lots of likes, comments, and shares.
- Have received this engagement in a short time.
- Are video based and receiving a large number of views.
Tips for content creation:
- Media must be exciting both visually and through copy.
- Share things that are interesting, authentic, and resonate with your audience.
- Avoid overly self-promotional spam or long-winded content.
- Keep the text to image ratio low (post with less than 20% text will do better).
- Remember always include a call to action (Facebook even let's you add a button top posts just for this). Always consider what we are wanting the reader to do with each post?