
Reading Between The Likes:
Divination, Superstition, & Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm
‘Just an offering to the gods of the algorithm.’
Jay Rosen, New York Times
If you ever want to gain insight into the hidden laws of the universe but don’t know where to start, Wikipedia’s ‘Methods of divination’ list contains several dozen entries, and all of them are tons of fun.
There’s gyromancy, where you spin around until you get dizzy and read the future in how you stagger afterwards. There’s ololygmancy, which finds meaning in the howling of dogs. There’s rumpology, or ‘bottom reading’, which US psychic Jackie Stallone claims to have used to predict Presidential election results (make your own Trump joke here).
And for social media managers, there’s feedomancy, defined in my personal dictionary as:
The superstitious and usually self-harming practice of using day-to-day Facebook analytics (reach, engagements, etc) to guess at larger changes in the platform’s newsfeed algorithm.
1. ‘Hmm, our posts aren’t performing well this week. That damned algorithm must have changed again.’
Publisher’s Paranoia
I catch myself dabbling in feedomancy all the time — the last time was a few days ago. I’d noticed that a certain kind of content (cheerful, celebratory post-treatment milestones about our beneficiaries) was consistently underperforming on our charity’s Facebook page.
So I spent most of the day trying to figure out why.
Were we being punished for bland adjectival keywords that we’d used too often? (‘amazing’, ‘heartwarming’, ‘inspiring’)
Or was it that reactions had been re-weighted and deprioritised within the algorithm, and as a result our purely positive posts (lots of likes but no shares) weren’t getting into people’s newsfeeds?
I didn’t resort to something which, like a lot of content managers, I’ve leaned on heavily in the past: namely, go onto an industry-peer group page on Facebook and anxiously seek out validation, or at the very least sympathy:
Hi, guys — just noticed that our posts have been reaching fewer people recently. Anyone else had the same problem? Thinking it might be a change in the algorithm :/
This was a good thing. Because eventually, I remembered the other possible explanation, which was, in fact, embarrassingly simple.
Wait. Maybe our followers are just getting a bit bored of this kind of content, and we need to change it up.
Miracles & Medicine Shows
It’s a kind of algorithm fever, I suppose (symptoms: agitation, second-guessing, blame-shifting). And as it’s an illness common to professionals in digital content roles, then it shouldn’t come as any real surprise that a small industry of quacks has cropped up around it.
Online articles about the Facebook algorithm are numerous, and split pretty evenly between the revelatory — ‘Algorithm Revealed’, ‘Algorithm Demystified’, ‘How Facebook’s Algorithm Works’ — and the combative — ‘3 Ways To Fight The Algorithm,’ ‘Hacking the Algorithm’, ‘How To Manipulate the Algorithm.’
Both kinds of article end up amounting to essentially the same thing: a melange of the insight that everyone knows (Facebook likes content that gets likes!), the advice that everyone can figure out for themselves (write content that your audience wants to see!) and a few sly tips about the keywords that the algorithm reportedly prioritises.
If you’re thinking that none of this sounds particularly data-driven, I agree with you. In fact, it’s all a little occultish, victory via incantation.
Say the magic word (‘baby’? ‘news?’ ‘breaking?’), and success will follow. We guarantee it.
Fairy Tales & Failures
There’s great story, widely circulated, about one of these keywords — perhaps the first urban legend of the digital content era.
Mark Zuckerberg fails to realise that he’s become an uncle, because the photo of his newborn niece or nephew hasn’t turned up in his Facebook feed.
In his fury (or with placid wisdom, depending on the teller), he calls up his programmers and insists that, from now on, posts containing the word ‘congratulations’ will always be boosted to the top of the newsfeed.
It’s a satisfying narrative — because it comes across as common sense (of course congratulatory posts are prioritised in a platform that overwhelmingly encourages positivity) — and because it’s so human in its fallibility.
It’s a relief to know that the laws of the digital universe may contain loopholes created by a peevish uncle, so long as we don’t think too hard about the story (wouldn’t Zuck’s sister have contacted him directly?).
Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations!
And, to be fair, journalistic consensus indicates that the ‘congratulations’ keyword effect did appear to really exist…or at least, it existed at one point in time.
Most anecdotal reports of its success were written back in 2013–2014, when Facebook’s algorithm was first created to replace Edgerank.
It’s now the year 2017. Things have changed.
Meanwhile, those ‘Hack’ articles are online and unedited, advertising themselves as cutting-edge insight for content marketers. Because, of course, the Internet has no past tense.
Consequently, just a few months ago, I saw one brand post the following message to its followers :
Apparently you can trick Facebook into letting more people see your post by using the word congratulations. Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations!
The post did OK, in case you were wondering. Just OK.
Big News!!
A surprising amount of this keyword theory seems to have its root in a single 2014 article in The Atlantic, entitled ‘Tricking Facebook’s Algorithm’, in which writer Caleb Garling claims to have ‘forced’ a post to the top of his friends’ feeds.
He did so with a post that actually wasn’t a million miles away from ‘Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations!’:

Caleb acknowledges that his ‘experiment’ was unscientific (‘at number two in my feed!’ isn’t proof of anything), although for my money he doesn’t address one big flaw in his study.
Did his post succeed primarily because of his carefully-chosen signifiers — ‘big news’, ‘so excited’ — or because it was encouraging his friends and followers to get involved in a fun, novel prank, and they quickly flocked to do so?
In other words, aren’t we seeing a reaction herefrom the audience, not the algorithm?
Pay-To-Win Digital Comms
At this point, I think it’s important to acknowledge that for many brands (and charities in particular), this kind of ‘game the system’ tactic isn’t a quirky experiment to be played amongst friends. It’s something far more serious.
Because organic reach does appear to be dropping near-universally for pages across Facebook, and it’s likely to continue to do so. It’s hard to be certain on this point, because the only real aggregates belong to social media agencies — but I’ve seen them posting average drops of 50% over six-month periods in the past couple of years.
For smaller charities, who often rely on building up a digital presence via free platforms like Facebook, that’s genuinely frightening. The ‘Congratulations! Congratulations!’ tactic may seem silly, but I completely sympathise: it’s something born out of desperation, in the face of a platform that doesn’t seem to want you to succeed.
And, of course, it’s a desperation that Facebook is increasingly playing on amongst its content creators.
Page owners now receive sly nudges encouraging them to add budget to posts, in the manner of an addictive freemium game urging its users to buy extra gold coins (Even the constant promise of meaningless reward is the same: ‘This post is performing better than 95% of your content. Boost it now to see more great results’).
I’m not saying we need to step away from Facebook — I’ll leave that to email marketers. It remains a vital tool for charities to engage with our audiences. But we do need to be able to inhabit its space without falling prey to its psychological tricks.
Let’s take a breath.
The danger for us, as social media managers, is that we end up becoming the frantic disciples of a fickle god.
When things go well, we congratulate ourselves for finding a foolproof method of ‘beating the system’. When things go badly, we scold ourselves for making some foolish adjustment that ruined everything.
Instead, we need to accept that the mechanics of the algorithm are always going to be just beyond our reach.
The laws of the algorithm, on the other hand, are simple. And they’re the ones we should aim to focus on, because they’re built on something that’s genuinely exploitable: Facebook’s overwhelming desire to please its users and keep them coming back.
And so we come back to an almost embarrassingly simple solution to a complicated problem:
- Put your audience first. Put their needs first. Build affinity with them.
2. Trust in people, rather than trying to second-guess the internal workings of the algorithm.
3. If it’s popular, Facebook will make it visible. If it’s visible, you can make it useful.
Nail it to your monitor.
Because after all, the platform may be fickle, and the algorithm may be murky…but in the end, Facebook needs exactly the same thing as all of us if it’s going to survive.
It needs attention.
