Have you noticed that your Facebook page posts are seen by far fewer people these days?

In what appears to be an effort to grow the bottom line, Facebook has taken measures to reduce organic or non-paid visibility of a post on a business page. At ZOOM, we’ve seen some of this and it begs the question, so what is going on?
Regardless, you need to know how your posts are ranked, so you understand how to maximize visibility. Here is the 411 on what determines that ranking.
8 Factors that determine the visibility of your Business page post:
1) Affinity, Weight, and Time Decay: the building blocks of Facebook’s EdgeRank continue to be important in ranking. Affinity = how close is the relationship between the user and the content source. Weight = what type of action was taken on the content. Decay = how current is the content.

2) Relational Settings: the relationship settings that the Facebook user can apply. With each friend, you can define the person as a “close friend” or “acquaintance.” With liked pages, users can choose to “get notifications” or “receive updates.”
3) Post Types: the algorithm takes into account the type of posts that each user tends to like. For example, users that often interact with photos are more likely to receive more posts with photos, than users that tend to click on links.
4) Hide Post/Spam Reporting: this takes into the account the users history of hiding a post or reporting it as spam. For every story, Facebook computes how likely the user is to hide that particular post.
5) Clicking on Ads: How a user interacts with Facebook ads can influence what shows in their news feed.
6) Device & Technical Considerations: the algorithm considers what type of device is being used when accessing Facebook, as well as the type of Internet connection.
7) Story Bumping: this feature bends the “decay” rules by giving older, unseen posts a second chance at news feed visibility if it is still getting likes, comments, and shares.
8) Last Actor: on an ongoing basis, Facebook tracks a user’s most recent 50 interactions, and gives them more weight when deciding what to show in the news Feed.
What does this mean to you? While the algorithm is complicated, it’s important to understand the inner workings of Facebook, and how it relates to your business and marketing strategies. Keep in mind, this is just one of many tools in your marketing toolbox and as such, it’s important to keep up with the ever changing dynamics of this platform.