How To Get Your Facebook (or any social network) Posts Seen

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If you post something on Facebook, it’s often your goal to maximize the amount of times it gets seen.

Facebook has a limit of content they can show a user before they get bored and leave the site (People average 50 minutes per day on FB), so they have to choose carefully what to show you.  What if you knew how to game the system to your advantage so that YOUR posts get shown more?

This means more engagement.
This means more free exposure.
This means Facebook is more likely to show your other content.

That’s what we’re gonna do now.  And here’s the secret to gaming the system…..

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To game the system you must first know its true motivation!

That’s right my young friend, if you dig deep and find the true metrics Facebook lives on, you can exploit that to your advantage.  :::insert evil laugh:::

What is Facebook’s true motivation? 
To keep you on Facebook long as possible.

What does Facebook get out of it?
Advertisers pay money to show ads to all the people looking at Facebook. The more time you spend on Facebook, the more “advertising inventory” they have.

Let’s take a look at some basic examples:

If Facebook keeps showing stuff to users that isn’t engaging and doesn’t keep them sucked in, then the person will leave quickly, spending only a littttlle bit of time per day on Facebook.  This is bad for serving up ads:

However if Facebook starts “bumping up” sticky and engaging content in your Newsfeed, you will likely spend MORE time on Facebook, giving them many more opportunities to show you targeted ads:

So Facebook wants us to spend more time in their ecosystem so they can serve up more paid ads.

A quick side note:

“If you’re not paying for the product, YOU ARE the product being sold.”

This quote is often used to make social networks look evil, but I think it’s amazing:

Facebook shows me some harmless ads, and I get to use their $200,000,000,000 world-wide computer infrastructure to play with my friends, promote my stuff, and be entertained….all for free!

I personally think it’s a very fair trade.  TV and radio have both worked the same way for decades too.

Now that we understand Facebook’s goal is to keep us on their site, we can see the reasoning behind their products:

• They noticed early on people pay attention to pictures, so they prefer posts with images.
• They noticed if you live-stream a video, your friends come to Facebook to watch and stay glued to Facebook, it keeps them on the site, and you bring other friends back to Facebook, you keep people commenting and interacting.  This is why they encourage you to do Live Videos.
• They noticed that vigorous discussion on a post sucks people into the conversation, keeps them reading, and keeps them coming back to Facebook to check the thread.  This is why they reward “higher engagement” posts with better placement in the Newsfeed.

Now let’s talk about how to exploit this for ourselves:

Imagine that Facebook assigns you “points” for every single interaction that happens on your post. As a rough example, let’s say the algorithm looks like this:

Someone comments on your post = +1 point.
Someone “Likes” your post = +1 point.
Someone shares your post = +1 point.
Someone “Likes” a comment on your post = +1 point.
Someone replies to a comment on your post = +1 point.

Below are two examples. One has zero “points” and the other has 15 “points.”

Now let’s take a look at another post, but that has a bit more activity and therefore “points”:

Now if you were Mark Zuckerberg, and your goal was to keep people active on your website, which one of these posts to show the user??

That’s right, the one with higher “points!”

Now this “point system” can sometimes skew your newsfeed to silly or infuriating posts.

It’s why crazy political articles get shown all over your newsfeed during an election year…..they simply generate the most buzz and discussion and “points” during that period of time.  Here’s an example of a filthy, stupid, horrible, dumbly-written, spiteful post that creeped it’s way to the top before it was removed (seen in a FB group):

Even though this post was absolute garbage, it showed up in my newsfeed over-and-over-and-over again for days.  It garnered 300+ comments before it got removed, and in total got more “activity” and views than any other post I’d seen on that Facebook group.

Behind the scenes, the Facebook servers were tallying up how many “points” this stupid post had, and it was through the roof!  Therefore this post was ranked highly in multiple Newsfeeds, and dinged lots of people’s Notification Centers with updates bringing them back to the post.

Although if you don’t want to be a huge prick to generate discussion, here’s a handy cheat sheet on how to boost the visibility of your Facebook post:

Facebook Exposure Cheat Sheet:

Facebook’s True Motivation:
Keep you on Facebook long as possible.

What Facebook gets out of it:
Serve up paid ads that make money per view and per click. Revenue is tied to time spent inside FB ecosystem.

What you can do to get the most attention on Facebook posts:

• At the end of the post request an action such as liking, sharing, or commenting below with something.
• Respond to every single comment, preferably with ANOTHER question for the commenter to make them comment again.
• When you respond to comment, tag the person in it for an extra notification on their homepage.
• Click “like” on every comment, even your own.
• Try to include a catchy image on the post. Simple images work best.

Essentially you want to make it appear there’s a ton of “activity” happening on your post, and Facebook will reward this with preferential placement in people’s Notification Center and Newsfeed.