The Facebook algorithm, explained by Meta's own documentation.
There is more written about beating the Facebook algorithm than almost any other subject in marketing, and most of it is invented. Meta publishes how Feed ranking works. Start there.
Facebook marketing advice has a peculiar habit: it treats the algorithm as a rumor to be decoded rather than a system its owner describes in public. Meta's Transparency Center documents Feed ranking, updates it, and names the signal types it uses. It is not a complete recipe, and it is not meant to be, but it is far more than the guesswork most Facebook algorithm best practices are built on.
What Meta publishes
The source is Our Approach to Facebook Feed Ranking in Meta's Transparency Center. It describes personalized ranking across more than two billion users, and it splits your Feed into two kinds of content: connected content from the friends, Groups and Pages you already follow, and recommended content from people and Pages you do not, added so you can discover things through others who share your interests. Ads are placed into the same Feed.
The ranking itself is four steps:
- Inventory. Everything available to show you.
- Signals. What the system knows about the content, the poster and you.
- Predictions. Models estimating how likely you are to find a given post valuable.
- Ranking by score. Ordered, then recommended content interspersed, then ads.
Explicit and implicit signals, and why that distinction matters
Meta separates explicit signals, such as liking, commenting and resharing, from implicit ones, such as viewing a post. That single distinction quietly retires a decade of advice.
When you engage with content in Feed, you give us a combination of explicit signals and implicit signals that help us predict what is meaningful to you.
"Tag a friend" and "comment YES below" were built for a world where comments were the only currency. If viewing is also a signal, then content that holds attention counts even when nobody performs enthusiasm for it. That favors posts that are genuinely worth watching over posts engineered to extract a reaction.
The controls users have, and what they imply
Meta documents several ways a person can shape their own Feed: Feed Preferences with Favorites, Snooze and Unfollow; Interested and Not Interested on individual posts, which temporarily raise or lower the ranking score for that post and posts like it; and a Feeds tab showing newest first in reverse chronological order.
The lesson for a business Page is uncomfortable but useful. Your audience can turn you down individually, and irritation is a ranking event, not just a bad feeling. Posting more often is not free. It is a withdrawal from a limited account.
Best practices that follow from the documentation
Everything below traces to something Meta describes rather than something a marketer inferred.
- Make content worth showing to a stranger. Recommended content is distributed to people who do not follow you. That is where reach beyond your follower count comes from, and it is earned by the content itself.
- Optimize for held attention, not extracted comments. Viewing is a signal. Engagement bait competes for a currency that is no longer the only one.
- Post less, better. Every post is a chance to be marked Not Interested. Frequency without quality actively costs you.
- Video that works muted. Feed autoplays without sound. Anything requiring audio to make sense is asking for an action most viewers will not take.
- Do not treat organic reach as a channel you can rely on. Connected reach is limited by your follower base and their behavior. If you need volume on a schedule, that is what paid distribution is for.
The honest part: organic Facebook is not a growth plan for most businesses
A local business with 900 followers cannot reach its town organically, no matter how well it posts. That is arithmetic, not an algorithm conspiracy. Organic Facebook is worth doing because it makes you look alive to somebody checking you out, and because occasionally a post travels. It is not worth doing as your primary source of customers.
The exception is content people want to pass on. When our founders ran a juice bar, one educational post reached 76,000 people and was shared 12,000 times, and the whole story is in the Body Juice case study. That was not a hack. It was something people wanted to send to a friend, which is the only version of organic reach that has ever scaled.
Where the reliable reach actually is
For most businesses the sequence is simple. Search catches people who are already looking, which is SEO and local SEO. Paid social creates demand among people who were not looking yet. Organic social makes you credible when somebody checks. Confusing the third for the first is the most common way a small marketing budget disappears.
If you want a straight answer about which of those your business needs first, text or call a founder. We will tell you even if the answer is that you do not need us.
About Mining Wells
We're on a mission to fix bad marketing.
Maybe:
- You are spending thousands on marketing tools, ads, and your website, with zero revenue increase to show for it.
- Every campaign you have tried gets minimal results.
- You have a great product that nobody seems to find.
- You are getting interest, but it never converts to a sale.
- You have a low retention rate.
- You have been paying a marketing agency for over a year and have not seen results.
You are not alone. Many founders and leaders live with the results of bad marketing without ever finding the reason.
And often that is because it can be many reasons. Sometimes it is the wrong ICP, sometimes the wrong messaging, sometimes the wrong targeting chasing impressions.
We are here to take the hard guesswork out and provide that clarity before it is too late.
At Mining Wells, we help founders and leaders grow their businesses the right way.
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