The Social Media Visibility Algorithm
Updated: Dec 14, 2021
Why don’t your posts get seen and what can you do to reach those billions of people (on the front running platforms alone)?
Facebook, prioritises community engagement above all else. Their algorithm identifies the timeliness of a post, when posts have value, if they have perceived value to a particular person and what the strength that person’s connection is to the person or page who posted it. They know that certain posts are more likely to keep people on the platform, having a conversation above others and therefore those types of posts are favoured by the algorithm.
Instagram also values community engagement but, it also categories each gram mostly based on what niche the image falls into. They use image recognition software to categorise each image as soon as it is posted, further referencing the hashtags, tags and location to additionally categorise. Images are then sorted by category and timeliness and then shown to new potential followers based on what categories they favour.
So - how does this affect whether your post will be seen by your friend or by your follower?
> Let’s use Joe as an example.
On Facebook, Joe has 300 friends, is part of 10 groups and follows 50 pages. On Instagram, Joe follows 200 Instagram pages (either business or personal). Joe also loves gardening and vegan cooking. Joe logs on to Facebook twice a day for an hour and on to Instagram once a day for 30 minutes.
Each of Joe’s friends on FB posts 3 times a day on average, there are 5 posts daily in each of his FB groups and each page posts once per day. On IG, each user he follows posts once per day. Plus Joe gets targeted by a certain number of sponsored posts because YES FACEBOOK IS A BUSINESS and it’s reasonable and not surprising that they want to see ad revenue.
This means FB has to organise 1000+ posts and consider what would be of highest priority for Joe as well as being timely when he logs in. Not surprisingly, real friendship connections and then group connections are valued above business pages. Even if someone has liked your page, if they never like your posts, slowly and surely FB will learn that. Each post will be somewhere on that list but it be way way down on the list where Joe won’t necessarily ever get to it. Likewise with IG - it organises the grams based on what it knows Joe is most likely to engage with, what he commonly likes, comments on, whose things he is more inclined to interact with.
Long story short: Generally there is no BIG BAD Facebook or other platform vendetta to make you invisible unless you are being picked up by their censorship team for being 'taboo'.
99.9% of the time, your posts will just not be being perceived by the algorithm as being engaging or value based enough to be higher up on the list.
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P.S.
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