This Marketing Methodology is based on the theory “Digital Tech Companies Don’t Like People” by Joe Youngblood. It is designed to use that theory and a detailed understanding of the nuances that drive a user’s news feed on Facebook to help businesses maximize the reach of their ‘Fan Page’ to their target audiences on the platform.

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Summary
Slide Deck
About the Facebook Machine
How to Use the Facebook Machine
References
Press / Mentions

 

Summary

• Methodology: The Facebook Machine
• Theoretical Basis: Digital Tech Companies Don’t Like People
• Platform Category: Social Media
• Platform(s): Facebook
• Goal(s):
  • Engage organically with current customers
  • Drive increasing traffic to a website via organic Facebook posts over time
  • Increase sales / conversions from Facebook visitors
  • Increase organic post reach
  • Increase shares of content on the platform
  • Increase organic engagements of content
  • Grow potential customer base over time

Budget: At its most basic form The Facebook Machine will cost about $100 per month or less. You will spend about $30 on a campaign to get new potential customers to like your page, another $30 per month boosting one post a day to your audience, and the rest left over to boost your post to potential new customers.

 

Slide Deck

 

About the Facebook Machine

In this Methodology Facebook isn’t viewed as a social network, at least from the Fan Page owner’s perspective. Instead it is viewed like a smaller version of the internet with the Fan Page acting like an email subscriber list / mail delivery tool and the news feed as a complex inbox spam / important message filtering program for the users on Facebook.

Just like with an email list, a Facebook user must first “Subscribe” to your page to see any messages from you. This is an important distinction for this methodology. We don’t use the term “Like” or “Follow” here to highlight that the action of liking a page is equivalent to an opt-in of an email list. Also just like an email list Facebook users can “Unsubscribe” (Facebook calls this an “unlike”) and they can also decide to “Hide All” content from your business page. The big difference here is that unlike an email list, there is currently no way to know who unliked or selected ‘hide all’ on your Facebook page.

If we begin to view the Facebook page as an email newsletter and the news feed algorithm as an inbox spam filter set to “maximum security” which would happily bounce all messages from a business away, we begin to see organic traffic on Facebook a lot differently and we can begin to understand how best to reach our audience. To do this we need to understand a few things:

1. What Factors the Algorithm uses to determine what content to show a user.
2. What kind of technology is employed by the News Feed Algorithm.
3. How users use Facebook (mobile app and desktop).
4. How Facebook itself views interactions between a business and their customers on the platform.

Sometime in 2011 Facebook killed off its EdgeRank algorithm which used 3 factors to determine what was placed in a users news feed: Affinity, Weight, and Time Decay[1]. In an August 2013 article on Marketing Land[2] we are told that EdgeRank was replaced by the more complex News Feed Algorithm which still uses those three factors but up to 100,000 other factors to determine news feed placement. This algorithm uses Machine Learning to figure out what content best fits into a user’s news feed at what specific time.

We can probably surmise that Facebook’s intended users of their news feed are the users on the platform and not businesses. Just like Google claims they only want to organize the world’s information from trusted sources for users, Facebook wants to organize a News Feed’s information for a specific user. This means the algorithm likely prioritizes content posted by friends that a user has connected with or been tagged in. Also much like Google’s engine Facebook wishes to use advertisements to earn revenue from businesses trying to get the attention of users scrolling through their feed looking for content or updates from friends.

Unlike with Google, users on Facebook are adept at scrolling through the feed often in ways that resemble physical wandering off simply seeing what is there during downtime at work, sometimes heavily while at work, while at home, while in a waiting room, spending time with family, before going to bed at night, while out at club with the girls / bros, and unfortunately often while sitting at a stop light. This means the advertising units would have to be embedded in the news feed to gain maximum ROI potential for Facebook. On Google the push has been to shove organic listings further down the page in hopes users are tricked into clicking on the ads instead.

Finally we need to see how Facebook might view customer and business interactions. Facebook doesn’t appear to believe in a frictionless connection between business and customers and often times treats business owners harshly. For example they have almost zero customer service, even if you are paying them thousands of dollars in advertising. It’s there, but buried and most business owners find it frustrating to reach Facebook. The fact that “Fan Pages” are separate entities and that Facebook threatens businesses using a profile with shutting down their account is another way we can see that they don’t want a seamless connection. Finally there are ways to ask questions on Facebook and what appears to be Facebook employees answer them. Except these are not employees but are volunteers Facebook has selected to answer questions as part of the “Facebook Help Team”. Often times their answers are completely wrong and leave users frustrated and angry, like in this case where a man wanted to merge his Fan Page with the page Facebook automatically created from Wikipedia content[3].

 

How to Use the Facebook Machine

Now that we have at least a basic understanding of the underlying theory and mechanics of the Facebook News Feed we can begin to use them to our advantage. You’ll need your page to be accessible by Facebook Business Manager (at https://business.facebook.com) and to have an active advertising account.

1. Create Custom Audiences

Create an audience that targets your potential customers. You should probably create at least 2 audiences. 1 for your Like Campaigns and 1 for your targeted boost campaigns (we’ll get to those later). You may identify that part of your targeted audience isn’t engaging with your content (you can see this in your Page Insights under People -> People Engaged), when that happens create a new audience to target them.

You’ll also want to create a custom audience for people who have engaged with your page in the last year. You can do this by going to the Asset Library (Business Manager > Audiences) and selecting the ‘Create An Audience’ button and then the ‘Custom Audience’ option in the drop down. A new screen will popup, here scroll down and select “Engagement”. Another screen will popup asking you to set a few parameters, there are a few engagement options. I recommend going with one of these options; Everyone Who Engaged With Your Page, People Who Engaged With Any Post or Ad, or People Who Engaged With Any Post or Ad OR People Who Sent A Message To Your Page. We’ll use this audience to help drive engagement on our posts.

2. Start a “Like” Campaign

Remember that we’re treating Facebook like a live email newsletter. We want to target possible new customers who aren’t connected to the Fan Page currently. You can perform these campaigns for as little as $1.00 / day.

If you look at your Page Insights you’ll notice that you have some “Unlikes” occurring over time. That means a page at rest (i.e. not generating new subscribers) will actually lose subscribers as time goes on (typically pages with good engagement over 100,000 subscribers gain new subscribers organically, pages lower than that lose more than they gain over time). These campaigns are designed to help your page grow among possible new customers. You should expect to pay anywhere from $0.10 to $1.00 per new page like and work to optimize your campaign to lower the price of new likes over time. We have seen some campaigns where the price for new likes goes up over time without changes to targeting.

3. Select a Posting Strategy

You need to post at a minimum of once per day 5 days per week. We’ve found that small local businesses or businesses with a narrow focus shouldn’t post more than once or twice per day. This finding has been independently corroborated by other groups like the team at Buffer App that found when they posted less frequently they increased the average reach of each post.

We also found a strange correlation with posting at a specific time of day every time we posted. This might not mean anything, but it might also mean that the machine learning algorithm Facebook uses could learn user behavior and use time of day as a signal on showing content in a user’s News Feed. This appears to be backed up by statements made by Adam Mosseri (head of News Feed at Facebook at the time, now Instagram CEO) in a Facebook video[4].

4. Create a Content Calendar

Probably the least favorite of all of the steps on the Facebook Machine, it is also one of the most critical. When scheduling content to post you want to make about every 3rd or 4th post something promotional about your business. The other posts should be a mixture of informational, emotional, or entertaining content related to your business or industry.

All content should be originally created or you should have the license / a reasonable fair usage argument for uploading the content yourself (Links are not considered ‘sharing’ by Facebook’s system and may be treated separately).

[Note: A previous version of the Facebook Machine stated the following: “Feel free to ‘Share’ content from other pages too. Shared content from other pages counts for your page as well and you get the added bonus of not having to create your own content.” This was removed when it was discovered that Facebook actively penalized reach for shared content and would no longer allow shared content to be boosted by the advertising system. [5].

5. Boost Each Post

You want to wait to Boost a post until a new post is made to the page. This is because it seems Facebook temporarily considers the Boosted post as an advertisement while it is being Boosted but then afterwards considers it an organic post again. Advertisements do not gain [much] organic reach on Facebook, so waiting until the following post is made helps maximize your paid and organic reach.

If you’re a seasoned page with some engagement occurring you’ll start by Boosting each post to the custom audience we created in Step 1. If you are not skip this for now and instead Boost each post for $1 to the Audience “People Who Like Your page”. You can boost to the Audience “People Who Like Your Page and their Friends” once you’ve began building engagement with the audience that already likes your page.

Remember the concept that Facebook doesn’t like people? Well to determine what a user should see in their news feed they offload the work to other users. The more users engage with a post, even though it’s paid engagement, the more that user will see most posts from your page, the more look-a-likes (similar people) might end up seeing the content, and the more they might share content from your page. While we have some good ideas about what the organic ranking factors are[6] there aren’t a lot of ways to target these factors individually unfortunately, for example you can’t target a group of people who like your page but haven’t engaged with it recently or more specifically shared a post.

6. Boost Each Post Again to Your Target Consumer Audience

When you’re Boosting something designed to drive traffic to your website or to drive monetary value for your business, you’ll want to Boost the post again to your target audience we created in step 1.

When a post gets good engagement boost it again for a minimum of $1 to the custom audience you created in the first step. It’s important to do this after your boost to the people who like your page. The reason to do this is because now the post has what is known as Social Proof, this helps validate that the post is trusted by other consumers and increases the likelihood of a click-through or a conversion.

 

References

1 – Various. “EdgeRank“. Wikipedia.org.

2 – McGee, Matt (Aug 16, 2013). “EdgeRank Is Dead: Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Now Has Close To 100K Weight Factors“. MarketingLand.com.

3 – Facebook Business User. “Merging a wikipedia automatically created page with my official fan page doesnt work“. Facebook.com.

4 – Mosseri, Adam. “News Feed Ranking in Three Minutes Flat“. Facebook.com

5- Winner Winner Chicken Dinner Research Team. “Data Shows Facebook News Feed Prefers Native Content Over Shared Content”. WinnerWinnerChickenDinner.co

6 – Lee, Kevan. “Decoding the Facebook News Feed: An Up-to-Date List of the Algorithm Factors and Changes“. BufferApp.com.

Press / Mentions

A – Darkstar, Laura. “Joe Youngblood Explains How To Dominate Facebook Ads for Less Than $100 A Month“. RocksDigital.com. [Based on a conference presentation about The Facebook Machine originally given on June 30th, 2017 in Addison, TX]

The Facebook Machine Methodology Changes Frequently – Stay Updated!

updated: October 1st, 2018