Social media algorithms are complex mathematical equations that track your behaviours, preferences and interactions on these digital platforms so that they can deliver a personalised feed. The ways in which they work are important for businesses that want to leverage visibility and engagement on these digital platforms.

Tagging other accounts and users will also keep your audience active, which is key for scoring highly in the algorithm.

Relevance

Understanding how the machine works is valuable to creators, marketers and brands who want to make the most of their visibility on social media. By understanding the nuances of algorithmic best practice on these social networks, businesses can ensure their content is seen by the most relevant and valuable audiences – and watch their businesses grow as a result. All algorithms differ a bit, but they share similar logic: Twitter’s X algorithm prioritises the ‘tweets you care about most’ and gives prominence to accounts ‘sending Tweets you’re most likely to engage with’; Facebook displays content in user’s feed based on ‘timeliness, relationships and other factors’; Instagram and TikTok algorithms ‘assess how interested you are in the person who posted what you’re looking at based on your past interactions and the account’s information’. Such algorithms can encourage the prioritising of high-quality and timely, engaging and relevant content, thereby keeping users more satisfied, incentivising revenue growth and continued stimulating further innovation and cementing community. Not least, algorithms could enable a user to be served the output of lesser-known creators or content from a niche area that wouldn’t ordinarily show up in the feed.

Engagement

The invisibles of social media are the algorithms, constantly matching one person to another, monitoring their likes, shares, comments and the things they have searched for, accounts they follow and direct messages they send in order to produce the feed for any one individual at any one time. Understanding how algorithms work allows social media users and creators to tweak their content strategy to generate more visibility on social media. It’s important to keep up with algorithm changes and updates in order to keep engagement high on social media. In a digital world that shows no sign of slowing down its expansion, algorithms are increasingly important in mediating our experiences of it. Unfortunately, as algorithms determine what kind of content different people see online, creating a fully safe digital world for billions of people is proving to be an especially daunting task.

Recommendations

Algorithms that control content recommendations in social media do so based on a complex set of parameters. Twitter creates its recommended posts based on relevance and timeliness, with the most-recent posts appearing at the top of the feed, while relationships also play a role, with the closest users to you first. Beyond that, it assesses higher ranking scores based on engagement with profiles, their authors, and their content. Facebook not only evaluates content and engagement, but considers countless other factors to create a trending-to-homepage personal feed process and Tumblr evaluates the like, reblog and comment elements of posts to maximise visibility as well as recency, location and device based algorithms to create feeds for each user. Techniques that ranked search results could ultimately rank users, favouring information they are most attracted to, and in turn creating echo chambers that limit exposure to outside perspectives, with potential risks for business. As social media platforms such as Facebook alter their algorithms, companies need to learn how to function. In particular, keeping up to date allows them to spot the tactics that are working, which can boost the visibility of their business and attract audiences more directly.

Reach

When you know the primary ranking signals at play on a social media platform, such as reach and engagement scores, you can naturally position your page for optimal performance relative to competing pages. Where do some of those rare individuals who ‘saw’ your post and reported metrics such as clicks and engagement come from? How can you make it more likely for your posts to reach them? Multivariate mathematical equations allow these algorithms to study the ways in which a user interacts and prefers content, helping to determine what feeds or other content the system will prioritise and show the user. This also considers how ‘relevant’, ‘recent’ and ‘popular’ a post might be. Such research indicates that algorithms reward moral and emotional content – eg, posts stoking moral outrage or political misinformation – more than other sorts of posts, resulting in a skewed distribution of PRIME-ish information that leaves many users frustrated at the inaccurate sources populating their feeds.