Dominating the Most Recent Facebook Algorithm Update
The seven hacks to breaking the Facebook algorithm and taking your engagement to the next level.
Key Takeaways
Facebook wants to keep people on their platform for as long as possible. The longer they can keep you on Facebook, the more ads they can share and the more money they can make.
Posting a link to an article or a YouTube video and sending them to their biggest competitor will hurt you.
Facebook will show your post to more people if you engage with your audience.
Engagement is how to beat the algorithm. It’s a simple concept, yet difficult to achieve if you’re not currently practicing it.
Facebook Engagement
First of all, what is Facebook engagement?
Facebook engagement is any action someone takes on your post. So likes comments, clicks, shares, video views, and so on will count as engagement. Now, here are the hacks to increasing your Facebook engagement for your business.
Boost your content. I've got a question for you: If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around to hear it. Does it make a sound?
If you want to increase your engagement on Facebook, you're going to have to boost your posts. Because there are 2 billion people on Facebook right now. Everyone is competing for the same five seconds of attention on the newsfeed. And on that newsfeed, guess what Facebook prioritizes posts with friends and family over business content? That’s right…the boosted posts!
This means even if you have followers on your Facebook business page, you're still not going to reach most of them. If you're starting from absolutely nothing (meaning you have low followers and engagement), chances are you're not going to get a lot of attention by just posting great content. The reality is that Facebook is not hurting for content anymore. Instead, it's the businesses that are hurting for attention.
Here's the good news: You don't need to spend a whole lot of money boosting your post. With only a $5 boost, a post could perform extremely well in terms of engagement and followers. Also, you actually increase your organic reach through increasing your engagement. So if you boost your post and everyone loves it, Facebook is more likely to show your post to them again, the next time you post. Not to mention, that they may love it so much that they decide to share it with their friends and you get a viral spin on your content. So go ahead and save yourself from low engagement by milking the Facebook algorithm by boosting your posts hack.
Create engaged worthy content. Do you want to know what's not engaging? Filling up your Facebook page with posts that have absolutely nothing to do with your audience and everything to do with your business. This happens a lot with small businesses. They create Facebook pages and start posting about how cool their business is and then they realize it’s still just their family and friends that are actually following them.
Here's the solution: Facebook prioritizes posts that spark conversations in meaningful interactions with people. So, you need to post content that pertains to the interests and goals of your audience if you want to engage them (even if that does not directly promote your business). Remember, you're competing for attention on Facebook. Once you have attention on a consistent basis, you can start promoting to your audience to monetize it. But until then, you need to:
post content that grabs people's attention.
You need a hook that piques people's interest,
you need a message that is authentic and relevant
you need eye catching images or videos that make people want to stop scrolling and digest your content.
Get people talking. Let me ask you something, which drink do you prefer: Coke or Pepsi? Here's another one, How often do you cut your yard: every two weeks or every month? Or, what's your favorite social media platform: Facebook or Instagram? Regardless of your answers to these questions, my point here is that posts that get people talking will increase your engagement on Facebook. Notice that these questions are very easy to answer. By asking questions with simple answers or comparison questions in your content, you increase your chances of increasing your Facebook engagement. The trick here is that you also want to be relevant to your audience in business as well. So a hair salon might do a comparison photo of two different hairstyles and ask their audience which hairstyle is their favorite? The bottom line here is: if you want to increase your Facebook engagement, you need to get people talking.
Interact with your followers. No one likes sending someone a text message and being left on read. And likewise, you don't want to leave the people who were engaging with your business on read, you should interact with them, your interactions and responses will contribute to your post overall engagement. And it might also encourage further dialogue and discussion, thus leading to more engagement on your Facebook posts. So don't sit back and say, oh, cool, I got five comments like you're a supermodel and everyone is just so flattered by you. Get in the game, interact with the people who are engaging with your business and build authentic relationships with your audience hack.
Avoid fishing for engagement. Facebook hates posts that acts for engagement. For example, posts that start with “comment below” and “share this” simply because you want engagement on your posts. Those tricks used to work really well like five years ago, but it's now frowned upon after the newsfeed exploded with these type of messages. So don't hurt your reach by asking for engagement. Instead, make your content so irresistible, that is hard for people not to hit that like button or engage with your content
Post more often. How much engagement can you get if you don't post anything at all? Probably none. Well, the same thing applies to your posts frequency. You're likely to get more engagement from posting five times per week than you would if you post it just one time per week. So make sure that you're posting frequently and consistently.
Also make sure you're not posting garbage. If you're posting a bunch of bad content, it can actually result in you losing followers and engagement. So craft your content carefully and choose a schedule that allows you to do this as consistently as possible.
Posts native content and keep people on Facebook. Why would Facebook show your posts in the newsfeed if it takes people off Facebook? Duh. Their entire business model is based on people spending as much time on their platform as possible. With that said, you're likely not going to increase your engagement by including links in every single post, or promoting your YouTube page. It is already proven that native content performs best in the Facebook algorithm.
Native content is content that is created solely for the purpose of the platform it is consumed on. For example, if you have video content, you should upload your video directly into Facebook and share it on Facebook's platform. Doing this will get you far more engagement than simply sharing a link to YouTube. Taking people off of Facebook and sending them to their biggest competitor is frowned upon.
Instead of linking to an article in your posts, take the major takeaways of that article and split it up into a series of social media posts that can be digested on Facebook instead of an external website. Doing this will keep people on Facebook longer and also help you break through their algorithm to increase your engagement.
Bonus Hack: Facebook wants to keep people on their platform as long as possible. The longer they can keep you on Facebook, the more ads they can share and the more money they can make. And what better way to do that than with video. Videos perform better than any other type of media content on Facebook in terms of engagement. Even if you use animated or stock video clips to supplement your posts, chances are is that it still will outperform other content types in the algorithm as long as your video is engaging.
These are the hacks that will break through the Facebook algorithm. By increasing your engagement the right way, Facebook will show your posts to more people.