If you do Facebook marketing, one thing that you might want to understand is the Facebook algorithm.
The Facebook algorithm helps make sense of the huge number of posts that people and businesses share every day and chooses the posts to show in our News Feed based on a huge number of factors.
We want to help you understand how your Facebook posts get viewed on Facebook. So we’re collecting all the relevant Facebook algorithm factors, updates, and changes and placing them here in this post for easy reference.
Read on, and see what goes into the complex, fascinating formulas of the Facebook News Feed.
Facebook algorithm values
Understanding the Facebook algorithm starts with knowing the core values that Facebook uses to guide their thinking and work. These values can give you a hint of what content will do well or not so well on Facebook.
Here’s a brief summary of Facebook’s News Feed values:
- Friends and family come first: The main objective of the News Feed is to connect people with their friends and family. So posts from friends and family are prioritized. After those posts, Facebook found that people want their feed to inform and entertain them.
- A platform for all ideas: Facebook welcomes all ideas while making sure that everyone feels and is safe. They aim to deliver stories that each individual wants to see the most, based on their actions and feedback.
- Authentic communications: Facebook prioritizes 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 customize their Facebook experience.
- Constant iteration: Facebook strives to constantly collect feedback and improve the platform.
The overview of the Facebook algorithm
So how does Facebook decide what to show in a News Feed?
Here’s a quick overview of how the Facebook News Feed works, according to Adam Mosseri, VP of Product Management for News Feed:
To make it easy for you to understand the Facebook algorithm, we went through all the (known) changes that Facebook has implemented to its algorithm and came up with a list of factors that we think may determine whether your post shows up or not.
Do this: The Facebook algorithm loves …
- Posts with lots of Likes, comments, and shares
- Posts that receive a high volume of Likes, comments, or shares in a short time
- Posts that are Liked, commented on, or shared by one’s friends
- Link posts
- Post types that one interacts with often
- Post types that users seem to prefer more than others (e.g., photo, video, or status update)
- Videos uploaded to Facebook that receive a large number of views or extended viewing duration
- Posts that are timely or reference a trending topic
- Posts from Pages that one interacts with often
- Posts from Pages with complete profile information
- Posts from Pages where the fan base overlaps with the fan base of other known high-quality pages
Watch out for: The Facebook algorithm is not too keen on …
- Clickbait
- Like-baiting
- Posts that include spammy links
- Frequently circulated content and repeated posts
- Text-only status updates from Pages
- Posts that are frequently hidden or reported (a sign of low quality)
- Posts that ask for Likes, comments, or shares
- Posts with unusual engagement patterns (a like-baiting signal)
- Overly promotional content from Pages—pushing people to buy an app or service, pushing people to enter a contest or sweepstakes, posts that reuse the same text from ads
To help you grow your Facebook Page reach, we’ve written a few guides that you might like:
If you want to dig into the Facebook News Feed algorithm, read on to find out all the relevant changes Facebook has made.
All relevant changes to the Facebook News Feed algorithm
(Last updated: October 2017)
Here’s a summary of all the changes that are relevant to social media marketers, in reverse-chronological order.
If you want to know more about any particular change, just click on the quick link and you’ll get more information about the change and how it may affect your Page.
- August 11, 2016: Posts that are informative will rank higher in the News Feed of people whom might find them relevant.
- January 7, 2015: Video is growing
August 28, 2017: Pages that repeatedly share false news
Facebook will be blocking Pages that share false news from buying ads on Facebook1.
Facebook found that some Pages had been using Facebook ads to build their following and share false news more widely. To prevent the spread of false news on Facebook, Pages that repeatedly share false news will no longer be allowed to buy Facebook ads (until they stop sharing such news).
The false news will be identified by third-party fact-checkers.
How may this affect your Page? If you share false news on your Page (perhaps unintentionally), you might be blocked from buying ads. It’s great to always check the validity of content before sharing it.
August 17, 2017: Video clickbait
Facebook will be demoting Facebook posts that pretend to be a video2.
Spammers have been tricking people to click on Facebook posts that look like a video but aren’t. These deceptive posts are often videos with just a static image or they feature a false video play button when it’s actually a link.
Here’s an example from Facebook3:
How may this affect your Page? Facebook warned that Pages that rely on such practices will see a significant fall in reach while most other Pages won’t be affected much4.
August 2, 2017: Webpage load time
Facebook will be showing fewer stories with links that might take a long time to load5.
It’s frustrating when a website takes a long time to load. Facebook found that “As many as 40 percent of website visitors abandon a site after three seconds of delay.”
Hence, Facebook is rolling out an update to show more posts with links that load quickly and fewer posts with links that might load slowly, in the News Feed.
How may this affect your Page? If your websites are particularly slow on mobile, you might see a fall in referral traffic from Facebook. Here are some tools and tips for improving your mobile site performance.
May 17, 2017: Clickbait headlines
Facebook is rolling out an update to show fewer posts with clickbait headlines6.
In its continued effort to make Facebook an informed community, Facebook is reducing the number of clickbait stories in the News Feed. This includes posts with headlines that withhold or exaggerate information, such as the following:
- “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS…”
- “WOW! Ginger tea is the secret to everlasting youth. You’ve GOT to see this!”
Posts that link to articles with such headlines will rank lower in the News Feed.
How may this affect your Page? If you depend on such headlines to get a wide reach on Facebook, you will see a fall in your reach. The good news is that once you stop posting such clickbait stories, your Facebook posts will stop being affected by this change.
May 10, 2017: Low-quality webpage experience
Facebook is rolling out an update to show fewer posts and ads that link to websites with low-quality experience7.
To help build an informed community on Facebook, Facebook will be showing fewer posts that are “misleading, sensational and spammy”. Specifically, they are referring to websites with low-quality experiences, such as the following:
- Websites that contain little substantive content
- Websites that have a large number of disruptive, shocking, or malicious ads
Posts that link to such websites will rank lower in the News Feed and might not be allowed to be used as Facebook ads.
How may this affect your Page? You might experience a small increase in traffic if you do not share such content. Otherwise, you’ll likely see a fall in your reach and referral traffic.
January 31, 2017: Authentic and timely stories
Facebook is making two changes to help authentic and timely stories rank better8.
To surface authentic content, Facebook will be analyzing Facebook Pages to see if they have been posting spam or trying to game the News Feed by asking for Likes, comments, or shares. If Facebook finds that a Page’s posts might not be authentic, such as people are often hiding those posts, Facebook will rank those posts lower in the News Feed.
To show people stories at the right time, Facebook will now study how people interact with posts in real time. For example, if there’s an important soccer game going on and many people are talking about it on Facebook, Facebook will show relevant posts higher in the News Feed.
How may this affect your Page? Some Pages might see a tiny increase in their referral traffic. Consider posting timely, relevant posts to get more reach on Facebook.
January 26, 2017: Video completion
Facebook is going to show long videos that people spend time watching to even more people9.
When ranking videos in the News Feed, a factor that Facebook considers is “percent completion” — the percentage of the video you watched.
Facebook now recognize that it takes more commitment to complete a long video than a short one. So it will now put more weight on the “percent completion” factor for longer videos.
As an example, if people are, on average, watching 50% of a 30-second video and 50% of a 10-minute video, the 10-minute video will rank better in the News Feed than the 30-second video. That’s because the 10-minute video has to be more engaging than the 30-second video to keep people watching for five minutes (vs 15 seconds).
How may this affect your Page? If you create long, engaging videos, you might see an increase in your videos’ reach. Short videos, as a result, might see a fall in reach.
August 11, 2016: Personally informative stories
Facebook will be showing you more stories that are personally informative to you10.
From its Feed Quality Program, Facebook found that people enjoy stories that are informative to them. Using the patterns that they learned from the program, Facebook will try to identify stories that are informative — usually, if they are related to people’s interests, if they engage people in broader discussions, and if they contain news relevant to them.
Facebook will then combine this new signal with signals of how relevant the story might be to each individual, to predict if they might like it.
How may this affect your Page? Informative content might get more reach on Facebook. From our recent experience, educational and entertaining content performs really well on Facebook.
June 29, 2016: Stories from friends
Facebook will be showing stories from close friends higher up in the News Feed11.
Despite the previous update, people are still worried about missing important updates from their close friends. So Facebook is tweaking the News Feed algorithm again…
