At the same time that you are concerned about creating quality content for your social media strategy, you must take into account other aspects that affect the ranking of your publications in this social network.
You’ve most likely heard about Google ranking, right? The same thing happens with Facebook. And there is also an algorithm to consider. If you want your social media strategy to be effective, you need to understand how it works.
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Today we won’t bore you with the reasons why you should use Facebook; the importance of this platform is no secret. Instead, we’ll tell you how the most important element of Facebook works: the Wall. And don’t worry, it’s not a horror movie.
So how does the Wall work?
As you know, every time a user opens their Facebook page, a ranking of all recent posts is created on the wall, posts from both their friends and the pages they follow. In this case, Facebook’s goal is to answer a question: which stories are the most important to your followers?
To achieve this goal, the content your followers see on their Wall follows four steps:
Step 1. Inventory
The Wall collects all the existing stories of your followers’ friends and the content published by the pages they chose to follow.
Step 2. Signals
To make a good decision, the Wall considers all available information about the publication. Different elements can be signals: the date of it (whether old or new), the author and his relationship with the follower (friends and family come first), even smaller things, such as the Internet connection users have when they scroll the Wall.
To try to improve your ranking, you should take these signals into account and create your publication accordingly. To do so, try to answer these questions:
- When are your followers active? When you are going to post, post at the time when there is the most activity on your page so that your posts have a better chance of competing for visibility.
- From which device are they most likely to check your Wall? Most users look at this Facebook page from mobile, so it is important to understand the type of Internet connection they have and adapt our posts to responsive.
- Do followers interact with your page? Followers who interact with your page are more likely to see your posts on their Walls.
- How many interactions are there with a particular publication? Posts that have more interactions (Likes and shares) are more likely to appear on the Wall of more followers.
- What is the topic of your publication? Target your publications to specific interests to reach more followers, use tools to know the right search keywords.
The most important signals include user comments. Facebook relies on them to understand what content may be problematic, and thus distinguish and deal with violent content, spam, clickbait and fake news.
There are many more signals that together help this social platform understand the purpose and content of a post and rank it. Use Facebook Analytics to gain valuable insights about your followers and customize your posts to suit your target audience.
Step 3. Predictions
Facebook analyzes all your posts separately and tries to evaluate them to find the ones that are likely to be the most meaningful to each of your followers individually. What does this mean? Its main component is the probability that a follower will participate in your publication.
Taking into account hundreds of thousands of signals, the algorithm has the ability to make relevant predictions about each content.
Examples of what Facebook predicts are:
- The probability of clicking.
- The likelihood of spending time with that content.
- The probability of getting a like, comment and share.
- The likelihood that followers think the content is informative.
- The probability that this content is clickbait (just a hook).
- The likelihood of linking to a low-quality web page.
Step 4. Score
After making the predictions, using all the consolidated signals, the algorithm develops a Relevance Score, a number that represents the probability that a particular post is interesting and meaningful to each user.
Facebook does it for every post, for every user, every time they open their Wall. The process is repeated over and over again until all the posts of your follower’s friends and the pages they follow are evaluated. Then, the content is formed on that Wall, where the order of the publications depends on theirRelevancy Score.
To use the tools well, we must have a thorough understanding of how they work. Now, we hope you can improve your inbound strategies for Facebook, taking into account all the ideas we have just given you. And remember, create meaningful content for your followers and work to get more of them to see it. You know how the algorithm works, now you need to figure out the techniques you can use to achieve your goals.
