The Facebook Algorithm Explained for Marketers

Want to maximize the reach of your Facebook posts?

Wondering how the Facebook relevance score and boosting posts can help?

To explore what marketers need to know about the Facebook algorithm, I interview Dennis Yu.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Dennis Yu, a Facebook ads expert and CTO of BlitzMetrics: a business that's part school and part agency for social marketers. For the past 20 years, Dennis has been working in marketing and analytics. He used to work at Yahoo! running analytics.

Dennis explains how Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes different types of engagement and post content.

You’ll discover how Dennis boosts posts to manage ad costs.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
The Facebook Algorithm Explained for Marketers
Dennis' Story

Dennis, who has done analytics at Yahoo! and helped build the website for American Airlines, has always been into math and data.

In May 2007, when Facebook launched its app-building platform, he built one of the first apps. Dennis had one of the original Facebook accounts and shares that in the beginning, Facebook didn't really have analytics, a news feed, or an ad system. As his app gained several million users, Dennis discovered a treasure trove of data.

These days, Dennis builds training systems that help young adults become apprentice digital marketers. His passions have always been mentorship and creating systems that enable him to scale his mentorship efforts. Students complete the training, are certified, and are then paid to work on packages.

The system is completely self-funded so every penny goes back to training young adults. Dennis thinks this reinvestment is the only way for businesses to scale. The training courses are based on actual execution. The more execution, the better the training and the more data available for developing standards for working with Facebook, Google, and other platforms.

Working with big organizations such as the Golden State Warriors, Rosetta Stone, food companies, and car companies gives BlitzMetrics a lot of data. This data helps them see patterns better and create benchmarks. For example, they can see that posting photos to galleries leads to more reach than posting single photos.

Listen to the show to hear Dennis discuss similarities between the Facebook algorithm and Google search.

The Purpose of the Facebook Algorithm

Back in 2007, you could trick the algorithm pretty easily; post statuses or get enough people to talk about something, and it would take off.

Since then, the Facebook algorithm has become smarter because Facebook has more data. More users produce more things such as video, images, and apps. Instead of looking at pure engagement, the algorithm now looks at how long people watch videos, click-back rates, and other factors that indicate whether something is a legitimate signal.

Today, the algorithm's job is to show users relevant content.

The more content (more friends and more posts), the stronger the algorithm's filter power has to be to deliver relevant content. For instance, the average user has more than 500 friends and likes 150 or more pages. The amount of content being produced keeps growing, while the user's attention remains finite. The more friends added and pages liked, the stronger the algorithm's filter power needs to be to determine what a certain user wants to see.

The number of times a user logs in per day also matters. The algorithm needs to work differently for a user who logs in once or twice per day versus 20 times per day. Plus, based on where you are, what you're doing,