“Why does Facebook keep changing its algorithm? It’s impossible to keep up.”
“Why make it harder for us to reach our audience when we’re the ones paying for ads?”
If you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone.
Marketers and advertisers have been grappling with Facebook algorithm changes for years. These updates often impact organic reach and ad performance, creating challenges for businesses.
The Facebook algorithm plays a major role in determining how your content performs. Staying updated on its changes is crucial for marketers aiming to maximize their reach by creating content that resonates with their audience.
Understanding how the Facebook algorithm ranks content is essential for developing effective social media strategies.
This article covers the major milestones of the Facebook algorithm and what they mean for your business. Plus, we’ve included 19 proven strategies to help you beat the algorithm and grow your loyal customer base. 🤑
TL;DR
The Facebook algorithm prioritizes content based on engagement, relationships, and relevance, showing users what they’re most likely to interact with. To improve visibility:
- Create Engagement: Ask questions and start conversations.
- Respond to Comments: Build connections by replying to your audience.
- Leverage Local Content: Post region-specific updates.
- Analyze Insights: Use Facebook’s tools to track performance and optimize.
- Post at Peak Times: Share content when your audience is most active.
- Focus on Video: Use Facebook Live, Reels, or short-form videos to boost engagement.
- Be Consistent: Post regularly without spamming.
- Join Groups: Participate in or create relevant Facebook Groups.
- Encourage Follows: Ask for follows tactfully on other platforms.
- Use Paid Ads: Supplement organic posts with targeted Facebook Ads for better reach.
Focus on high-quality, engaging, and platform-native content to work with the algorithm and grow your audience!
- How the Facebook algorithm works
- 16 strategies to beat the Facebook algorithm
- Start conversations
- Speak and reply to your audience
- Get local
- Leverage Facebook Insights
- Post at the right time
- Avoid “down ranked” content by posting relevant content
- Be focused on Facebook videos
- Be consistent, consistently
- Join relevant Facebook Groups
- Ask for follows (the right way)
- Have your audience prioritize you
- Get brand advocates involved
- Put the platform first
- Make each post unique, even if it's repurposed
- Make it Facebook official
- Don't forget the power of paid ads
- Best Practices
- Go tackle that Facebook algorithm with confidence
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How the Facebook algorithm works
The Facebook algorithm operates using four main factors:
- Inventory: This includes all content on Facebook that could potentially appear on a user’s feed.
- Ranking Signals: Indicators used to prioritize content. Key signals include:
- Who: Friends, family, or organizations you engage with most.
- Content Type: Whether users prefer videos, photos, links, or articles.
- Post Interactions: Engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares, especially from people you often interact with.
- Prediction: Based on past behavior, Facebook predicts what content you’re most likely to engage with. Machine learning plays a crucial role in this process by interpreting user data and personalizing content in users' feeds.
- Score: Facebook assigns a quality score to every post. Higher relevance equals a higher score, making the post more likely to appear on your feed.
Understanding how the Facebook algorithm works is essential for enhancing your social media presence. The algorithm’s goal is to provide a relevant and socially engaging experience for users. Understanding how Facebook evaluates and prioritizes content is just the first step—now it’s time to focus on actionable strategies to work with the algorithm, not against it, and ensure your brand stands out.
16 strategies to beat the Facebook algorithm
Now that you understand where the algorithm has been and where it stands today, you’ve likely realized how it can hinder your brand’s exposure.
As Facebook focuses on being a people-first platform—empowering users to control what appears in their feed—it’s become harder than ever for brands, especially new ones, to break through. Understanding the Facebook algorithm is crucial to enhance your facebook marketing efforts and ensure your content reaches the right audience.
But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
By analyzing past algorithm changes and understanding what it values most in creating relevant feeds, we can help you adapt and thrive. Additionally, it's important to recognize how Facebook pages function similarly to individual accounts in terms of news feeds and algorithms, emphasizing the need for original, high-quality content.
Let’s dive into 19 proven strategies to beat the algorithm and put your brand in front of the right audience.
Start conversations
To boost your ranking, the goal is simple: start conversations that drive engagement with Facebook users on your posts and ads. Social signals, like likes, comments, and shares, play a critical role in improving your post’s performance over time.
Social engagement is essential for increasing the visibility of your organic posts and improving ad performance. The best way to encourage engagement? Be genuine. While creating controversy can spark conversations, it’s not a strategy to rely on exclusively. Instead, focus on being funny, entertaining, or relevant by discussing trending topics or sharing inspiring stories.
Milk Makeup does a great job starting a conversation by asking their audience what their weekend plans were—and by asking what kind of trouble they’re planning to get into.
One of the most effective strategies is to ask open-ended questions. While Facebook frowns on blatant engagement baiting (e.g., “Comment below!”), you can still encourage comments by posing thoughtful, open-ended questions that let your audience lead the discussion. For instance, Loot Crate did this brilliantly by asking their Marvel-loving audience, “Who is the funniest character in the MCU?” This simple question sparked over 2,700 reactions, nearly 200 comments, and almost 500 shares. Now that’s engagement.
By mixing in open-ended questions, humor, inspiration, and even a touch of tasteful controversy, you can create a winning formula to keep your audience engaged and your posts thriving.
Speak and reply to your audience
Facebook excels as a social network platform because of its robust targeting capabilities—not just for paid ads but also for organic posts. With options to set audience preferences for each post, you can tailor your content to reach the right people.
But targeting alone isn’t enough to drive engagement. You also need to create content that resonates. Keep your audience in mind when crafting imagery, messaging, and headlines. When your audience feels seen and understood, engagement naturally follows.
The work doesn’t stop there—replying to your audience is just as important. If someone comments on your post, respond. Show them that they’re heard. This simple act not only encourages further engagement but also brings your brand to life by giving it a voice.
By focusing on conversations and actively engaging with your audience, you’ll build stronger connections and increase responsiveness on your ads and posts.
Get local
Another big “audience first” push has been with local content. Facebook's main goal is to build meaningful interactions, so local content has started to trend higher than a lot of national content. This tends to help brands that are more local and regional.
Posting content that focuses on specific cities or regions, especially where a brand has a strong presence, is recommended.
Cortina's, a local restaurant from Anaheim, CA, did a great job of this by partnering with the Anaheim Economic Development Team. Shortly after the coronavirus stay-at-home orders were initiated, the two companies collaborated to focus on local and small business food delivery and takeout.
Leverage Facebook Insights
To beat the algorithm, you need to know how your content performs and you need to know who your audience is. The easiest way to do this is by going to the Facebook Insights tool located in .
When you navigate to the “Audience” tab of the insights tool, you can check out various metrics about your current and potential audiences, including top cities and countries they're located in, and demographics like age and gender.
It's a far reach from the audience analyses we used to have when Audience Insights (an old-fashioned version of this tool) existed, but it can still give you some valuable insight to inform your strategy.
You can also see metrics on your Facebook page performance by navigating to your Facebook page and clicking “Insights” in the left-hand navbar.
While this overview won't tell you much about your specific audience, it can help you stay on top of posts, traffic, and engagement trends which can be useful in evolving your strategy.
Post at the right time
I'm sure you've heard the phrase “timing is everything.” That's just as true with your content pushes. If your audience isn't online or doesn't seem interested, you should consider posting at a different time.
Recency is another “signal” that helps decide which post to show. So the newer, the better.
You need to post during peak engagement hours. Every brand is different because they all have a unique audience. If you don't know what time of day your audience is most active, try posting at different times of the day and track performance over time.
If you run ads, you can use “day” breakdowns first to see what days of the week your ads perform best. That can be a good baseline to test out with your organic posting schedule, and you can narrow it down to specific time windows from there.
Once you know when your audience is online, plan your content calendar around that to publish at the right moment. The timing is just as important as the content itself.
For example, if you sell a B2B service to businesses who typically don't work on the weekends (and probably prefer not to think about work on the weekends), then why would you post on the weekends?
Avoid “down ranked” content by posting relevant content
Facebook has various categories of content that they will flag to “down rank.” And this doesn't just apply to the offending post but also the offending page. To avoid this, steer clear of
- gray area content (the content isn't exactly prohibited, but it lives in that gray area…and you're aware of it)
- “fake news” or misinformation
- sensational health claims and misleading health information (e.g., “Guaranteed to help you lose weight”)
- manipulated videos, also known as “deepfake” videos
The easiest way to avoid down ranking is to follow this rule of thumb: “if you have to ask, just pass.”
Be focused on Facebook videos
As we mentioned, Facebook has continued to make video a top priority, especially with the growing importance of Facebook Videos. Also, Facebook itself has said that video drives better engagement.
Additionally, understanding Facebook Reels is crucial as its algorithm prioritizes short-form video content to enhance user engagement and visibility.
So video needs to be baked into your strategy some way, somehow.
If that’s making your pocketbook nervous, video doesn’t have to be expensive. Not everyone has a film and production crew handy, so there are many inexpensive and sometimes free ways of producing high-quality videos for your content posts. Here are just a few of those ways:
- Promo.com: At KlientBoost, we’re big fans of Promo. Their tool has a flat monthly price and countless video templates that make producing and editing high-quality videos a breeze. The best part is that it’s at a fraction of the cost of a production-quality video.
- User-generated content: More commonly known as UGCs, user-generated content helps leverage a cheap and sometimes free way to get video content for your brand. This could be a customer (often influencers) who upload a video reviewing, unboxing, etc.
- Facebook Live: Facebook Live is a free and great way to engage with your brand. It allows your audience to have direct access to you and interact with you in real-time. It’s also been found that Facebook Live videos receive an average of six times as many interactions than regular videos.
Makeup giant Sephora has done a great job staying engaged with its audience by frequently using Facebook Live to showcase makeup tutorials, which drive powerful engagement.
Be consistent, consistently
Brands everywhere think they need to post every day or multiple times a week to stay relevant. While that may be the case for some, that's not the case for all brands.
The truth is, you need to post at whatever cadence works best for your brand.
Facebook has also said that one of the algorithm's determiners of how meaningful pages or groups are to a user is based on how often they post. So while you don't need to post like crazy (you don't want your brand to appear spammy), you do need to post regularly.
Figure out when your audience is most engaged with your posts, and keep a consistent pace of posting to stay relevant (not annoying) to them.
Join relevant Facebook Groups
Although there are constant changes to the Facebook platform, Facebook does a good job of keeping you up to date with these changes.
At Facebook's 2019 F8 Conference, Zuckerberg announced there would be a big push to make Groups a cornerstone of Facebook. They've stayed true to their word through continued advertising of Facebook Groups, including this popular TV commercial on a basset hound Facebook Group.
The most important announcement from the F8 Conference was when Facebook said people “may see more content from Groups in their news feed.”
So what does that mean for your brand?
We recommend you join relevant Facebook Groups for your brand and audience and start some conversations there. You don't want to be “salesy” in the group—that'll leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Just start ordinary conversations, be personable, and represent your brand the best way you can.
If you're extra adventurous, consider starting your own Facebook Group. It doesn't have to be specific to your brand as a whole. It could center around brand themes (where the goal is to get conversations started), discuss, educate, solve problems, and, most importantly, engage with your audience.
Ask for follows (the right way)
Your brand has fans, even if it's new to the scene.
You might have friends, family, early customers, or just the buddings of general fans and supporters. If they aren't already following you, they should be. 😉
So why not ask for it?
The key here is to avoid “engagement baiting” and clickbaiting, though.
While posting on Facebook, you shouldn't explicitly ask for a follow, like, comment, or share like this. You want that to happen naturally.
So, ask for follows outside of Facebook, especially on high-profile content. Do you have a blog post that gets a lot of traffic? Casually ask for a follow at the end. What about a YouTube video that's trending? Ask for a follow at the end. You get the picture.
Have your audience prioritize you
Facebook has done a lot of work helping its audience control what they see on their user's feed. From surveys to brand lift studies, they want to put the most relevant content at a user’s fingertips.
To make that even more apparent, Facebook rolled out the “see first” feature we talked about, which then evolved into the “Favorites” feature. This feature allows users to decide what content appears first on their Facebook feed.
Now, while you can’t outright create a Facebook post to beg your audience to “add your brand to their Favorites,” you can do it in a tasteful way outside of Facebook.
On external sites (like a company blog) or during phone calls, onboarding, or wherever you ask for page followers, tell your potential customers they can also add your page to their “Favorites” if they’re so inclined, so they’ll never miss an update from you.
The best way to outsmart the algorithm is to get your audience to tell the algorithm they want****you.
Of course, this will work best if you are producing high-quality content that your audience actually loves. If you aren’t driving a meaningful impact, why would they choose you first?
Get brand advocates involved
A great way to build up your engagement on Facebook posts and beat the algorithm is to get your brand advocates involved, especially early on in building a brand.
A brand advocate isn't necessarily a customer. It could be anybody—friends, family, employees, or general fans and supporters.
This is huge, especially with Facebook prioritizing content from friends and family. If you want to expand your reach, get your advocates involved in spreading the word. The reach will follow.
Put the platform first
This tactic is quite simple.
If you want to grow your audience on Facebook, expand your reach, and build engagement, the easiest way to do that is… well, to keep users on Facebook.
Many businesses try to link back to their site and get people to take a specific action. That's a great strategy for advertising, but not necessarily for your organic posting on Facebook. There's a time and place for it.
Instead of linking externally, build engagement by posting videos, photos, and Facebook Live sessions.
Of course, you may want users to buy a product now. But if you don't want Facebook to shuffle your posts to the nether realms of the feed, keep your audience on Facebook. The more engaged your audience is, the more likely it is that they'll gravitate toward your site on their own in the future.
Make each post unique, even if it's repurposed
This strategy is one of my favorites because it’s also applicable to advertising on Facebook, a major social media platform.
In short, it’s tough to continually come up with new content (or ad) ideas. It’s very common for people to run out of ideas for content to promote.
A common strategy many use when the creative well runs dry is repurposing content.
It’s okay to re-post a previous post that drove great engagement. But the key is to make it different each time.
Although the “content” of the post itself is the same, test variations each time you repurpose. You could test new imagery, a new headline, or new body text altogether.
Tales of the Cocktail did a great job repurposing an old high-engagement piece of content years later. By switching up the text, they were able to drive 2x the reactions and 10x the comments.
Make it Facebook official
I'm not talking about the “becoming boyfriend and girlfriend” type of official. What I mean is that it's time to get Facebook verified.
This infamous blue (sometimes gray) badge is your rite of passage into legitimacy on Facebook. This not only proves your business's legitimacy to Facebook, but it also proves to your audience that you have a strong brand presence.
What verification does is prove that you are who you say you are, shows overall authenticity, and ultimately helps you get a higher news feed ranking while people are scrolling.
Just about everyone these days is familiar with hashtags (#overit). But hashtags, if executed correctly, can lead to some real marketing success, especially on Facebook.
By implementing hashtags, you'll be able to reach people you previously couldn't while they're searching for similar topics.
Here are a few quick hashtag tips:
- Keep it relevant: Keep them relevant to the post and relevant to your brand. Don't let people find you for entirely irrelevant topics.
- Don't overuse hashtags: You don't need to use them in every post, and you also don't need to use 127 per post.
- Use the same hashtag across all social media platforms: You don't want to have to manage different hashtags across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Be original: Create your own unique hashtags if that applies to your business.
Don't forget the power of paid ads
The hardest part about organic posting is that it's tough to scale. Using Facebook Ads is one of the easiest ways to scale your business at a relatively low cost.
We've already talked about Facebook's targeting capabilities and how ad creative makes a significant impact organically. Advanced targeting tools are available to you in the Ads Manager, too, and creative is just as important to advertising.
The most successful brands on social media marketing platforms supplement organic strategies with paid ad efforts. This is how they expand overall reach and grow their business.
Take our client, ShipStation, for example. They started Facebook Ads with us and increased their number of sign-ups by 400%.
Facebook ads help your brand get better visibility, more reach, and increased engagement, typically in a more controllable way than organic.
If you're not already running digital marketing ads on Facebook or haven't at least tested it, why the heck not?
Best Practices
Here are some best practices to help you optimize your Facebook content for the algorithm:
- Post High-Quality Content: Always aim to post high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your target audience. Quality over quantity is key.
- Use Native Platform Features: Leverage Facebook’s native features like Facebook Live and Facebook Stories to create interactive and immersive content. These features are favored by the algorithm and can boost your visibility.
- Experiment with Formats and Styles: Keep your content fresh by experimenting with different formats and styles. This not only keeps your audience engaged but also helps you understand what works best.
- Incorporate Relevant Keywords and Hashtags: Make your content more discoverable by using relevant keywords and hashtags. This can help you reach a wider audience who are interested in those topics.
- Engage with Your Audience: Respond to comments and messages in a timely and personalized manner. Engagement is a two-way street, and showing that you’re listening can foster a loyal community.
- Use Interactive Features: Utilize Facebook’s built-in features like polls and quizzes to encourage engagement and interaction. These tools can make your content more engaging and fun.
- Monitor Performance: Regularly monitor your page’s performance using Facebook Insights. Adjust your content strategy based on what’s working and what’s not.
- Avoid Low-Quality Content: Steer clear of posting low-quality or spammy content. This can harm your page’s credibility and visibility, making it harder to beat the algorithm.
By following these best practices, you can optimize your Facebook content to work with the algorithm, not against it, ensuring your brand gets the visibility it deserves.
Go tackle that Facebook algorithm with confidence
Facebook still remains one of the easiest and most convenient sources of reaching a wide audience.
Establishing a presence, understanding your audience, and learning how and when to best reach them are all critical factors for continued success and growth.
And although Facebook keeps us on our toes with algorithm changes, they do roll them out in a way that's accessible and easy to adapt to. That helps businesses better understand how to tweak their Facebook strategies in response.
It's essential to continually stay up-to-date on the algorithm to know how to beat it.
You're the algorithm expert now. Armed with knowledge from past to present, plus a hefty list of tricks to outsmart the algorithm's AI. We'd say you're ready to break through the barriers holding you back on Facebook.
And if you're ready to take tip #19, read our next article about starting up on Facebook Ads.
So get started…and get seen. 👀