Facebook’s Algorithm Part 1: The Mystery of Your Newsfeed

Some things may never be understood: modern art, what makes Chipotle so delicious, the internet, or how your Aunt Sally’s best friend’s daughter’s baby pictures ended up on your Facebook news feed. Much like the mystery of Google, Facebook has been baffling page owners on how and why certain post perform so well while others don’t. Though we may never understand all 100,000 plus factors that go into Facebook’s news feed algorithm, here’s a crash course to curtail the confusion.

Three main factors make up Facebook’s EdgeRank, or algorithm, for what posts appear on each individual user’s news feed:

• Affinity: the relationship between the viewing user and the creator of the story, how often do you interact with the fans on your page?

• Weight: Facebook loves to see your posts filled with videos, photos, links, and engagement from other users.

• Time-Decay: to keep content fresh, Facebook tries to show the newest content on news feeds while older content will appear less and less. If your posts aren’t engaging, you’ll become ancient history.

Facebook is constantly evolving their algorithm to improve the quality of posts by adding and removing features and trying to eliminate the amount of spam that may appear on your newsfeed. Rather than trying please the algorithm, the important thing is to focus on creating interesting and relevant content and the reach will follow. Much like the seven wonders of the world or the end of the dinosaurs, there are some things that are better left a mystery and the Facebook algorithm is definitely one of them.