What is an algorithm?
Social media algorithms are extremely integral to the day to day running of a social media platform. After all, with all of the content being published, there has to be a way to control it. That is the essence of an algorithm: a tool to help identify what content a user would want to view. But if you plan on using social media to help grow your career within the music industry, it’s pretty important that you can understand what an algorithm is, and how to take advantage of it. During this article, we’re going to discuss the algorithms across multiple social media platforms, and how to optimize your content for them.
The Instagram algorithm is extremely simple in comparison to Facebook. Up until recently, content was shown in a chronological order. However, due to the massive output of content on the platform, they introduced an algorithm to give users control as to what they see in their feeds. In general, it will show you new posts from people that you regularly interact with. This may include direct messages, liking and commenting on photos, and even simple things such as mentioning them in a caption. The whole idea is that Instagram wants to show you content from people that you have a genuine interest in. If you’re not engaging with a profile/page very often, you won’t be shown their content regularly.
Facebook is probably the biggest example of a social media platform using algorithms to great effect. Part of the reason for this is because the platform is so big and simply opting for a chronological news feed was only inviting constant spam as people battled to get noticed. According to Facebook, they want to make sure that people receive the content they actually care about. It made it extremely difficult for businesses to get noticed, and many say that this algorithm changed opened the era of ‘pay to play’ on social media.
With a constantly changing algorithm, it is always important to stay on top of what Facebook is implementing within the platform. Therefore, it’s often a race between content pages (such as a producer), and friends & family of a person in order to show up within a newsfeed. Although it’s hard to list absolutely everything within the algorithm, there are some general strategies that you can implement on your content immediately: How much engagement has the post received? How often has a user interacted with your content? The more, the better. The performance amongst people that have already viewed it.
So basically, Facebook cares about the engagement of posts on the platform. If you’re able to drive people to engage with your content, Facebook is happy to show it to more people. Makes sense right? But the thing that catches a lot of people out is advertisements. If your page has general low engagement on posts, it’s going to be more expensive to run an ad than if your engagement was amazing. This is simply because Facebook prefers high-quality content, and therefore will charge low performing pages a premium to advertise.
In conclusion, engagement is undoubtedly the primary factor that will lead your social media profiles to success. However, as organic reach is so low, it means that you’re most likely going to have to pay for good engagement. Although this may be annoying for marketers, I can’t help but admire Facebook’s business model. As technology throughout the world gets smarter, the algorithms will adapt. And so I highly suggest that you get ahead of the market… before the market gets ahead of you.