Let’s pretend a social media algorithm ran a buffet you’re going to. When you get to where the food is served, you will find all the most popular items. Maybe that’s pizza, sushi, steak, potatoes, and all the other top items that customers pick most often. Let’s say you grab a slice of pepperoni pizza and a sushi roll with salmon. The next time you’d go up to get more food, the food displayed would look slightly different. Now, pizza and sushi are the first things you see, and while the pepperoni and sushi with salmon are there, there are also more varieties of this item. There is a combo pizza, meat lovers pizza, and other varieties than you initially saw.
Let’s go back to social media. You can see above that the first thing you saw was based on everyone’s popularity. The next visit was based on your first visit. Same thing with social media. If you like a post with a puppy, guess what? More puppy content for you! Social media algorithms rank the content they will show you by monitoring what you engage with. That can be what you’re actively engaging with by liking, commenting, or sharing posts with your friends. It can also be passively engaging with content like video watch time.
This is a good time to plug in an example of a social media hack. Because algorithms go off how long or how many times you watch a video. Some users have put long captions on a video that is only a few seconds long. Users who read the whole caption then rack up multiple “watches” of this video, triggering the algorithms to think you really like this content. Now, these hacks can be eventually punished by the algorithms as it doesn’t want content that’s gaming the system. Similar to how stuffing a bunch of keywords in blogs was once an SEO hack, keyword stuffing now hurts your SEO.
So, how do you use social media algorithms for your benefit? Create content that is easy to engage with and has strong hooks to gain your audience’s attention. Viral content is often quickly likable. As that, like engagement, is a positive signal for social media algorithms to continue distributing that content. However, don’t simply prioritize engagement, as Meta now punishes engagement baiting. Ideally, it should be a balance. Creating content with good hooks or mixing in easily supported posts while also having more depth content.
