Millions of people and businesses want to excel in social media. The reason is obvious; it’s one of the best digital marketing channels, an owned media channel with enormous opportunities for business growth. But you know what’s interesting?
To grow their social media presence, most people check out generic information such as social media management tips. Not many are interested in outside-the-box social media management or algorithms.
They might have a point because social media algorithms are an unidentified topic! Most of us don’t know what the term refers to. Before we dive into each social media channel algorithm, let’s talk about that for a second.
Social Media Algorithms
Social media algorithms are, in fact, how social media works today. In other words, the set of rules that defines which social media content will be favored! A fair bit of warning here, most social media algorithms are powered by artificial intelligence so no one precisely knows how the system works.
You might be asking why knowing the algorithm is important. Well, if you know how social media algorithms work in detail, you can come up with far better social media strategies. Strategies that bring results.
Think about it. You don’t know how a car works, or you don’t know how to drive, yet you try to learn advanced driving techniques. That sounds odd. It’s the same with social media.
3 Best Social Media Channel’s Algorithms
To use social media channels to your advantage, you must have an opinion on how they work. We will start explaining just that in a second. Since each social channel works a little differently, we will go through them individually.
1- Facebook & Instagram (Meta)
Yes, Facebook is not having the time of their life these days. The meta rebranding or the launch of oculus doesn’t seem to add much value to the brand. Their shares in the stock exchange are as low as ten years ago.
Nevertheless, we are still talking about a social media platform that has 2.9 billion users on Facebook and 1.4 billion on Instagram. According to these figures, these social channels are still huge and booming.
Regarding Facebook & Instagram algorithms, our best-updated (2022) source is Facebook’s official page about its feed. According to Facebook, they favor posts that are relevant and informative. Meta takes their time to explain these two points in detail on their feed landing page.
They evaluate relevancy by looking at three signals:
Who posted it: Who you interact with most is prioritized in your feed, such as friends, family, news sources, businesses, and public figures.
Type of content: Content types that are frequently interacted with are also prioritized: photos, videos, or links.
Interactions with the post: Posts with high engagement from your popular accounts are prioritized.
Also, everyone can personalize their feed by tapping on feed preferences and hiding a post or unfollowing an account.
Facebook also encourages clear headlines, accurate information, and a no-spam policy.
2- LinkedIn
LinkedIn, with its 810 million members, is a social media for professionals that can still bring lots of organic reaches. That’s important because, with organic reach possibilities, you can create leads for free. However, getting your posts in front of your relevant audience and strangers takes a bit of learning how to play with the LinkedIn algorithm.
The excellent news is LinkedIn algorithm doesn’t seem to be in a constant change mode, and there are quite a bit of social media experts who seem to crack the LinkedIn code. Let’s check out how the posting algorithm works, along with a bunch of do’s and don’ts.
So when you post content on LinkedIn, the algorithm tries to sort it into three main categories: spam, low-quality, and high-quality content. You might get flagged if you use bad grammar, tag too many people, or use spammy or too many hashtags. Also, if people report your post as spam, that could be the end of the game, so be strategic about your post and avoid dragging people into clashes by tagging them.
If your content is nothing special, LinkedIn will sort it as low-quality. This is determined by the reaction of your followers on LinkedIn. Your content is first shown to a group of people from your followers; if they engage with it, content makes its way out to strangers. Usually, LinkedIn marks it as high-quality content if a piece of content also gets attention from strangers. In this case, you get an incremental amount of traffic to your profile.
Do you want to have a look at the official read on the LinkedIn Algorithm? Below is the article from LinkedIn’s blog:
Mythbusting the Feed: How the Algorithm Works
3- Twitter
Twitter has around 400 million active users globally and the platform seems to hold on to its value as a social media platform even after Elon Musk bought a fair bit of shares and speculated a lot about the company’s future.
Regarding the Twitter algorithm, fortunately, we have two official articles from the Twitter blog that explain how Twitter ML works. In 2016, Twitter decided to give people a choice between an algorithm and no algorithm.
We can choose to view an algorithmic home timeline. It displays a feed with content from the people you follow and content suggestions based on what you often interact with. The non-algorithm option is viewing the most recent tweets.
To make the most out of the Twitter algorithm, tweet consistency is critical. By constant testing, find a sweet spot between 1-5 tweets per day.
Tweeting at the right time is also another vital factor. This Hootsuite research suggests that the best time to tweet is 8 a.m on Mondays on Thursdays. But if Twitter is your primary social channel, you should take your time to find the best time to share.
The intelligent use of hashtags, such as branded hashtags or leveraging trending hashtags, is another best practice. In addition to using smart hashtags in the tweets, you can engage with content in a relevant hashtag to increase your reach.
Adding variety to your text content is our final way to challenge the algorithm, especially videos, GIFs, and polls can make all the difference in the content you share on Twitter.
Social media algorithms could be complex to understand, but it’s hard to grow your social media presence without them. The good news is that if you are serious about your social media game, we are here to do the heavy lifting! Get in touch with us, and let us uncover the best strategies to address each social media algorithm.
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