Here’s How Facebook Algorithms Work and How You Can Increase Your Organic Reach

With an enormous 1.65 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains the widely-used social media among all age groups. In fact, everyone has a Facebook account and we all use it – excessively.

The Facebook algorithms can figure out what any one of those users sees in their News Feed when they spend their time on Facebook. Luckily, in the last few years Facebook has started explaining us more and more about the News Feed algorithm – how it works, what it prefers, what it hates, and what matters for business pages.

This makes simpler for many brands to improve their organic reach on Facebook. Let’s find out some tricky and smart ways to boost your Facebook organic reach, what type of content the Facebook algorithm favors and what brands can do to increase their chances of displaying in their target audience’s News Feed.

Tips to Increase Your Facebook Organic Reach

Never Compromise on Quality

Facebook algorithm focuses on quality. Sharing quality and engaging posts is essential to not only increase your chances of being appeared in News Feed, but having your content displayed higher in users’ feeds. Follow these best tips to maintain quality.

• Try to create and share quality and engaging content
• Try to share valuable guide, tools, tips, infographics, DIY and FYI blogs and other type of quality content that your users will want to read.
• Share valuable posts that is relevant to your industry and that educate and inform your users
• Share videos that are interactive and make sense for your niche.

Avoid Spamming

Facebook hates spammy content, avoid it any cost, especially if you want to boost your

Facebook organic reach. Follow these best tips to avoid being spammy.

• Avoid sharing content that has no value and doesn’t look reliable.
• Avoid clickbaits tricks such as using exaggerated headlines but the post has no key information
• Avoid sharing a post that has a lot of clicks
• Avoid sharing posts that directly encourage users to like, comment and share.
• While searching for content to share, carefully watch out the frequently shared content
• Avoid spammy links such as content that include irrelevant images, inaccurate language or formatting just to entice people click    through to a website that only contains ads.
• Don’t share overly promotional posts that explicitly ask people to buy a product, or download an app, without providing any value to the user.

It is advised to follow the best practices offered by the Facebook itself to increase your Facebook organic reach.

Clickbait Best Practices

Share headlines that are catchy and inform readers

Share headlines that set the right expectations and the content has valuable insights and big data for users.

While curating content, share links that have accurate and compelling headlines.

Best Practices for Live Video

• Inform people earlier when you are going to broadcast
• Go live when you have a strong internet connection
• Before going to live, create a compelling description to create a hype.
• Ask your audience to follow you and receive notifications when you broadcast
• Respond to each commentator by their name and reply their comments
• Go live for longer to reach a wider audience
• Come up with unique ideas and broadcast these ideas often

How Facebook Algorithm Works?

According to Facebook, the average user has access to more than 1,500 posts per day but out of which, he only looks at 300. If truth be told, the Facebook algorithm considers thousands of factors to determine which post should be among those 300 that get appeared in the user’s News Feed.

Keeping some important signals and factors in mind, Facebook curates an overwhelming amount of content into a manageable chunk for the individual user. This ranking algorithm was primarily known as EdgeRank.

The old Facebook News Feed ranking system considered three important elements:

Affinity – which shows the relevancy between the user, the content and its source.

Weight – which shows the type of action is taken on the content.

Time Decay – which shows how trendy the topic is and when it was posted.

The Facebook’s new News Feed algorithm also include these three items along with 100,000 other factors. Majority of these factors are based on user behavior and on their actions on a particular piece of content.

Facebook News Feed Core Values

Basically, Facebook has codified some things and named it set of core values which every social media marketing agency should take into account while adjusting algorithm for News Feed. Some important core values include:

Your Posts must be Informative

Create meaningful posts as people values informative and educational posts.

Your News Feed Should Entertain

People enjoy reading entertaining and funny posts. Sharing Live videos and funny photos are important to engage your users.

Share Every Type of Idea

Facebook News Feed algorithm favors all ideas and viewpoints and using ranking to connect people with the sources or stories users find the most engaging and meaningful.

Reliable Information

Facebook really works hard to understand the type of posts people consider authentic so that they can show more genuine posts to the users.

Constantly Improving

Facebook constantly tries to improve its processes and aiming to figure out what content matters most to the users.

What Factors Facebook Algorithm Considers Most

This video clearly explains the factors that Facebook News Feed ranking matters most. The algorithm takes these things into account:

• The type of content
• The timing
• What engagement it gets

How You Can Control What Shows Off in Your News Feed

Since, Facebook algorithm considers thousands of factors when deciding what to show in a user’s News Feed, such as who posted the content and whether the user tends to engage with the post. Facebook offers some tools for users that allows them to get more control over what you see in the News Feed.

Users have the option to:

• Choose friends and pages and give their content a high priority in their News Feed, so that you won’t miss their posts.
• Find news pages through page suggestions based on user’s preferences.
• Unfollow pages, people or group that have displayed in the News Feed in the past week.
• See the list of all people and pages they have unfollowed and then follow back to get their updates.

So, these are some surefire ways to get your content visible on Facebook that will ultimately increase your organic reach. Follow them strictly and make the most of it.