Understanding the Facebook Algorithm in 2021

if you're a person with a facebook profile it is definitely to your advantage to understand how the topic of this video affects your virtual life if you're a business or organization with a facebook page it is mandatory that you understand how the topic of this video affects your business and the visibility of your posts surely by now you've heard the term algorithm surely you can't be serious i am serious and don't call me shirley but today i want you to understand what's behind the algorithm for example did you know that the organic reach of a page post is down to 5.2 percent for 2020 and the average engagement rate is now 0.25 percent that's a quarter of one percent these are pretty damning numbers meaning people aren't seeing your posts but not because they don't want to but because they're not given the opportunity to see them and that's the algorithm at work my goal here is to turn you into an expert on the topic because if i can do that you can start using the algorithm to your advantage so hope you're comfortable because we have a lot to cover [Music] let's start with this the definition of algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem solving operations in the context of social media specifically facebook the algorithm is a series of program logic that decides what you see when you see it and in what order and in truth it's not one algorithm but layers and layers of logic filters continually tweak to maximize your engagement it's multiple algorithms facebook is software as a service and all software contains algorithms their algorithm contains the answer to the question what exactly made a certain post or ad show up in your feed why did you see one friend's post and not another's the reality is your entire facebook experience is highly dependent upon the algorithm what you see when and in what order see software only knows what humans program it to know now you might be saying hold on what about artificial intelligence well software can only learn what humans program it to learn but if you feel like our friend algo is some sort of power hungry big brother hiding behind the scenes pulling the strings of social media all i can say is you're right but know that humans control the algorithm and there is a method to the madness to understand the algorithm from a high level you have to understand its goals which are the business goals of facebook at the highest level they simply want your attention they want you to keep scrolling they want your time they want to show you as many ads as possible and they want to sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder they are a platform and you are the product the more ads they show you the more money they make the more organic content they show you the less money they make so they have to walk on a balance beam of sorts show you just enough organic content to keep you interested in scrolling but leave plenty of room for ads to show up so they can monetize your attention i should mention that the average american spends 58 minutes per day on facebook which is really pretty sad if you ask me that number is closer to 38 minutes for the worldwide audience and last year facebook declared 86 billion dollars in revenue so a realistic goal for facebook would simply be to increase that 38 minute global number by 10 to 42 minutes so they can make another nine billion dollars per year and just so we don't lose touch on what a billion dollars is it's a lot more than 900 million dollars now the facebook algorithm goes back to 2009 so recognize they've had over a decade of experience to work on making it more intelligent you give a giant skilled team of programmers 12 years and that's basically enough time to control the behavior of most of the developed world and for better or worse the algorithm is not static while it is logic released to the platform to make programmatical decisions it can still be tinkered with day in and day out if the average organic reach of a post is 5.2 percent and facebook has a bad month they can just decrease it to 5.1 percent and show everyone slightly more ads than usual they can turn any number of dials day in and day out to manipulate what you're exposed to or even worse manipulate your behavior just as an example the average facebook session is 4.82 minutes so they know if they show you a new notification right around 4.81 minutes they might be able to buy another 30 seconds from you this is why you can check your notifications and scroll through your feed and then magically just a short time later a new notification pops up and alerts you and it's something that isn't even time sensitive at all the new notification probably isn't even something that happened in the last five minutes it's just them deciding to tell you about it or alert you to keep your app open and use scrolling they also know if you haven't checked your feed in a few hours or so and if that's outside your normal behavior they can produce an alert and push it to your phone and try to win your eyeballs back this is why i highly recommend turning off all push notifications on social apps especially for our youth push notifications are simply handing your attention span over to a group of people that do not have your best interest in mind now before we talk about the layers of algo let's quickly go over what facebook knows about you so you know what all they have to go off of to base their programmatical decision filtering on to produce your personalized feed try saying that three times if you're not sitting down you might want to sit down for this facebook knows what articles you've read and shared they know what photos you've looked at and how often they know where you are where you've been where you frequent and where you live they know your belief system and your political leanings how you ask well by people you're friends with public figures you follow or your friends follow articles you've liked or shared memes you've liked or shared all of this is actually extremely easy for them to categorize they know essentially everything about you except your search history only your isp and google know that but rest easy those two aren't friends with facebook in fact they're enemies which is a good thing because that combination would be incredibly powerful but facebook does know a good part of your browsing history due to the facebook pixel that most businesses use so when you ask what all does facebook know about me i'm telling you they know everything they know stuff about you that you don't even know they're practically inside the subconscious level of your brain because they've been watching you interact with friends and information news photos and videos for years now and if all this sounds a little scary let me just say this it's because all this is a little scary [Music] so now that we understand what all facebook knows about you which is basically everything down to the smallest detail let's talk about the layers to the algorithm and how it decides to create your feed first we'll start with inventory not that kind of inventory inventory is every single item that is eligible for your feed if you have a couple hundred friends follow a few pages or in a few groups this will easily be a list of hundreds of items long this is algo's first step gathering all available inventory keep in mind on top of any organic inventory any ad that matches you for the target audience also goes into a bucket of ad inventory considered as well this represents all the inventory available to populate your feed facebook knows that it has an average of 4.82 minutes when you open the app so it has to show you the most interesting stuff to keep you scrolling viewing and clicking ads because 4.82 minutes is probably only going to give them enough time for you to consume a tenth of that amount so imagine your screen can show maybe three items before scrolling so facebook needs to figure out the first 10 things to show you so it's ready for the top three in the initial scroll so we have 500 items and they have to decide on the first 10 which in this scenario is 2 of your available inventory for this moment in time what to show what will make you scroll and not close the app what will make you stay inside their ecosystem and not click away these are some of the questions that facebook has to ask after determining all available inventory for you in this moment of time algo is now ready for step two and that is to run a scoring pass over the inventory based on ranking signals type of post recency etc facebook claims they have thousands of ranking signals everything from your current internet connection speed to whether you prefer to engage by liking or commenting example if you're riding in the car on a road trip your internet connection will be very different than if you're at home on your wi-fi so showing you a 12-minute video that someone uploaded to facebook probably won't make the inventory cut for this moment in time facebook will wait until you're on a faster connection so the viewing experience is better they can't control your connection speed so they would run a risk in this scenario showing you something that requires maximum bandwidth the video could show up glitchy and they run the risk of you closing your app not good for them so these thousands of ranking signals like this are broken down into two categories passive and active passive signals are non-active metric items like view time type of post time posted connection speed and how long it's been since you last checked facebook active signals are items that promote engagement such as likes reactions shares and comments type of posts include categories like textual status updates a photo or a video a link a question or an event recency is obviously the time of the original post but consider this something could be posted a week ago that is just now starting to pick up steam with multiple comments and shares today so though the post isn't recent the broad interest could be recent which would then add score to that item once this automated scoring pass is finished inventory now considered for the feed moves on to step three step three is a scoring pass based on prediction of engagement facebook knows your typical behavior whether you're more likely to like or engage with a picture of your aunt's cat over a picture or video of some car doing donuts in a parking lot they know you are more active in one group versus another they know you like content on certain topics and not on others they know who you facebook stalk and who you never interact with they know who you're active in messenger with they know who's at the same concert or restaurant you're at posts from these accounts are ranked a little higher posts that are garnering reactions likes loves and so on are ranked higher hearts are worth more than likes and comments are worth more than reactions prior engagement leads facebook to think that those posts might win your engagement so based on algo's prediction of your engagement they will score certain items in inventory higher than others at this point you can see that after starting with hundreds of items in inventory the number of items considered for your feed is getting smaller and smaller but unfortunately algo isn't even done yet it's time for step four step four is an additional scoring pass that is looking at the type of post its goal is to modify the ranking of posts established in step 3. for example let's say at the end of step 3 the top 30 ranked items for your feed are 5 videos 2 photo albums 15 photo posts 5 textual posts and 3 posts from a group well it's not the best user experience them to show you all five videos in a row or all three ads in a row or all 15 photos in a row they want to try to make it interesting so they'll show you a photo and then a text post and then maybe a group post and then add a photo a video a text post an ad so on and so forth they mix up the content type in your feed so there's enough content diversity to maintain your interest now i want to pause right here and come back to this step in a minute because there are some tactics here that you can use to your advantage what i've discussed so far are the main algorithm passes but we know there is much more to the equation much of which isn't disclosed by facebook and hasn't been leaked yet but there are some additional items i want you to consider consider that you are allowed to have up to 30 favorites you can choose up to 30 friends or pages to be deemed your favorites and essentially you're giving those accounts permission to bypass the majority of the algorithm making it far more likely for those accounts to make the cut into your feed i highly suggest you do this i also would recommend limiting or at least being thoughtfully selective about which pages you choose to follow and groups you choose to be in every business you know wants you to follow them but let's be real that's ridiculous every show or channel you watch on tv wants you to follow them as well this is what facebook calls your interests you liking this movie or this tv station these businesses this netflix special these public figures this news source the more they know about you the more they can target ads towards you the less they know about you the harder it is to match your eyeballs to the zillions of ads that businesses are paying for now back to algos step 3 and 4 ranking content based on prediction of engagement and content type if you're a business trying to increase your post visibility you need to do the best you can by providing interesting content that will create engagement sometimes a one sentence textual post gets more visibility than a photo because it's simply unique and it helps facebook provide content diversity and know this in fact if you've ever spent time managing facebook ads you already know this but facebook knows how much text is in a photo post and they do not like text and photos it screams a promotional content type so its visibility will be extremely limited business or personal imagine how facebook views a link to an external article or a link to any external website especially youtube they hate it you can expect visibility on those posts to be far less than five percent it's an invitation to leave facebook and spend your allotted screen time on someplace other than facebook they have no incentive to show you that helpful article or youtube video to your network it's less than no incentive it actually costs them money because it sends people away from their ecosystem see facebook is tasked with providing a unique compelling experience to 2.8 billion accounts you don't like everything that i like so facebook has to learn your habits your behavior your interest and use that to maximize and monetize your attention and they have one goal make money make as much money as possible off your time and your attention i lived in a similar world not too long ago although the end goal wasn't nearly that crude i spent years programming algorithms into my software primarily to curb hacker activity eliminate fraudulent financial transactions and to increase user engagement in fact years ago i developed a prototype of a social network which i'll just call twitter for now as it was somewhat of a combination of twitter and facebook trying to see if i could come up with a facebook alternative that was better for long-term mental health one of the differences was that the number of likes and the number of friends would not be disclosed and the few as there were would be pushed to the margins basically take all the elements that develop psychological issues and negative experiences and get rid of them and get back to the simplicity of just friends sharing with friends i do believe whoever executes on that idea best will be a billionaire if that's something you're into now there are good sides to the algorithm not many but some for instance without it you would see way too much promotional content or too much from people you barely know or that post too much so for people like that facebook will wait until that over posting loose acquaintance of yours posts something that garners some engagement and then they'll decide to show it to you because your past habits have shown facebook that you do not pause to engage with their content all that often so to facebook's defense what you will rarely hear me speak of we do need an intelligent algorithm but we have to accept that their goals are not our goals and their goals write the code not ours so how do we use the algorithm to our advantage well at least now you know how the algorithm works you know what it's looking for you know how it's trying to rank and arrange posts you know that posts that are winning engagement will be ranked higher and seen by more people we know that those that overpost are ranked lower and that those that rarely post are ranked higher because it gives facebook something unique to show you if facebook is a tool for you and not just some time sucking anxiety causing social network then you're gonna have to get creative for example if you're a youtuber or promoting off-network content you might upload teaser videos natively to facebook facebook loves a native video uploaded directly to them but be careful with your speech because facebook knows what you're saying in your video it's like texting an image they're reading and listening to content that was historically hard to read and listen to if you're a business maybe start a small group of maybe 15 people that are your inside circle of trust if it was me i could call it matt's insider group and in that group i could say hey my business is going to post something in an hour try to find it like it love it comment on it share if you feel led that initial boost of engagement will trigger the algorithm to your advantage and help you break out of the 5 average exposure rate maybe you cycle the types of posts you release photos videos photo albums textual posts questions see what naturally works and when and then expand on what you learn you have to make your content valuable to facebook not just to your audience the bottom line is within facebook your content has to be interesting for your audience and valuable to facebook which is what will create above average engagement and keep people in the fb ecosystem hey thanks for watching i truly hope this helps and was time well spent for you if you like what you saw click that like subscribe and ring that bell for me i've got a lot more videos to come and by subscribing you'll be notified when i release new videos thanks again and take care

Channel: Matt Murph

Views: 2,257

Keywords: Facebook, business, start up, entrepreneur, algorithm

Id: dBMEcpcdv3s

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021