You may not think of Facebook as new and edgy anymore. But you can’t deny its popularity. There are more than 2 billion monthly active Facebook users, with 1.37 billion actively using the social network every day.
It is no surprise, therefore, that many people and businesses try to earn money from Facebook. With such a vast potential audience, it makes good sense.
It can be challenging, though, to make money on Facebook. Because of Facebook's sheer size, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. This is particularly the case now that Facebook only shows a selection of posts in a person's feed. In fact is it probable that the statuses you lovingly craft and upload to your business page will reach no more than 2% of your followers.
Every time somebody opens their Facebook feed the Facebook algorithm goes through four steps to decide which posts it will show that person:
- Inventory – the algorithm examines all of the recent statuses shared by the person’s friends and the pages they follow.
- Signals – it then takes a look at a whole range of signals based on the user’s past behavior. These include, who made the post, the average time spent on content, post engagement, tagging and comments, how informative the post is, and many other signals. A significant signal from a money-making point of view is that the algorithm weights statuses from people as being more important than posts from pages.
- Predictions – the signal attempts to guess how the user will react to a particular story – will they share it, comment on it, read it, or ignore it?
- Score – The algorithm generates a Relevance Score for each post, based on the signals and its predictions.
When Facebook assembles a person’s feed, it only shows the posts with the highest Relevance Scores.
We have previously shown how Instagram, which is Facebook-owned, operates a similar scheme inHow to Beat the Instagram Algorithm Without Actually Cheating.
