Just as companies once tried to game the Google search algorithm by employing all kinds of elaborate tricks to get their posts to the top of Google’s search results, they are now taking the same approach with Facebook’s news feed algorithm. And that’s leading to some strange content – such as the “If you love Jesus, click this” promotion – showing up in your Facebook news feed.
In other words, brands, companies and, yes, scammers, are trying to reverse-engineer Facebook the same way they once tried to reverse-engineer Google. The first step was to figure out what kind of content people are clicking on, liking and sharing. The next step was to figure out how the Facebook news feed algorithm rewards all that clicking, liking and sharing.
The first step was the easy part: highly visual content is going to do better than pure text content. And here’s something else that does well: inspirational content. The combination of all those factors has led to the creation of highly-specific content like info-graphics (a picture is worth a 1000 words!), lots of inspirational memes, and any photos that are funny, cute or just slightly weird.
This content does especially well on Facebook because the company’s news feed algorithm “rewards” this content. It treats likes, shares and comments as proof of “engagement” and the key defining feature of Facebook is to be “engaging.” The more engaging Facebook is, the more time you’ll spend using it, right?
There’s also one other factor at play here, and that’s the deluge of content being published on Facebook. There’s just too much content to show Facebook users every update from every friend and every brand they follow. So Facebook has to figure out a way to show only the “best of the best” – and this just so happens to be defined as the most engaging content.
That makes sense on an intuitive level – if lots of people are talking and sharing about some piece of content, it must be worth sharing with others, and so it makes sense for Facebook to show that content to as many people as possible.
This partly explains why someone might create a “If you love Jesus, click this” post for Facebook. It’s just a lot easier to get this type of content to appear in a user’s newsfeed than standard promotional stuff they might be able to create. It may seem slightly irrational, but it’s actually very rational.
Not only will Facebook “reward” good, likable content, it will also start to assume that their other Facebook content must be pretty good, too. If you are able to string together a few viral Facebook posts, you raise the statistical odds that your other content is going to start appearing in news feeds everywhere.
Going back to the Google search example, this would be similar to Google determining that a site is a “high authority” site. A few awesome blog posts were once the way to get Google to give your site a higher ranking. And now that same kind of thinking is taking over Facebook – only “engagement” has replaced “authority.”
Since the “cost” of creating a Facebook post is essentially zero, there is no economic disincentive to keep creating more of this content. Especially since the alternative – paying money to promote your Facebook posts – does have a very real non-zero cost attached to it.
For scammers trying to promote certain products, Facebook can be pure gold. Their goal is to pile up the “likes” – a process that CNN has referred to as “like-farming.” Once their Facebook page has enough likes, they can then start promoting specific products. And, in some cases, they’ve been known to reinvent themselves overnight. One day, the Facebook page is full of “Click if you like Jesus posts.” The next day, the page is full of promotions for quack medicines. So think twice before liking or sharing that “Share if you love Jesus image”. You might just be promoting Facebook spam.
If anything, the “fake news” scandal of the past few months has just highlighted the unintended consequences of Facebook putting so much emphasis on engagement. Since December, Facebook has said that it has tweaked its algorithm once again, to put more emphasis on credible news sources and “real news.” So don’t be surprised if people adapt and find some way to game the system once again.
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