A Strategy for Using Facebook Algorithm to Your Advantage

The first step in using the Facebook algorithm to your advantage is to understand the basics of social media algorithms - especially Facebook. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are designed to prioritize individuals over businesses. This is simply because Facebook and Instagram want to retain a semblance of that old-fashioned Sunday evening front porch visiting experience. This means that an organic business post is only shown to 5% of its audience on average. Facebook shows your post to only the users who engage most with you, and intentionally skips those who don’t typically engage with your posts.

When you put a great post out that connects and gets great traction, here’s what happens:

Say we have 1000 followers. We post something and Facebook puts it in the feed of 100 of them. Only 20 - 30 of your followers will likely even see it since people don’t always scroll through their entire feed (only my mom does). Of those let’s say 15 notice it enough to pause and read. 10 followers might click to read more, like, share, save it, click the pic, or comment. Any of those actions constitutes engagement. This scenario does not paint a pretty picture.

In contrast, let’s say this post was so fantastic that all 15 followers who noticed the post commented, and 5 of them reposted it. Now it’s reposted in 5 people’s feed with hundreds if not thousands of people seeing it in their feed because a person (their friend) posted it rather than a business. Those friends then comment or click or share. And on and on. Now we have engaged people, lots of brand new viewers, and have successfully tweaked our exposure algorithm.

When you get a lot of shares and other engagement on a post, this will also be great social proof since that post now will have 65 comments and 200 likes. Social proof is the concept that people will follow the actions of the masses. Humans want to be in on things that are popular, and tend to be skeptical of things that aren’t.

How does spending $2 a day promoting posts play into that? By boosting posts, it guarantees that anyone in our engagement audience (including the new eyeballs from our followers’ friend’s friend’s friend’s feed) will see that post in their feed. When you promote your posts, you bypass the algorithm and even tweak it to your favor. This means that your next organic post (a post that’s not boosted) will be shown to more people.