It seems improbable, but there are still many people out there who have no idea what gets ACTUAL engagement from a post. Many of these same people are business owners, who may believe they’re doing enough. It’s wasted effort when it doesn’t work.

Here’s what does…

Engagement is not Unique

This mainly pertains to Facebook for the point of this article, but it laterally applies to every other social media platform out there, because engagement as a concept is not a unique thing to any one platform, but describes actual involvement with a post in a statistic easily tracked, and able to be used for transformative methods in marketing practices.

We’ve seen a lot of people copying and pasting this status into Facebook, believing it works.

Fixed my blocked posts. I wondered where everybody had been! This is good to know. It’s ridiculous to have 400+ friends and only 25 are allowed to see my posts.

I ignored this post earlier because I didn’t think it worked. It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.

Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed. Their new algorithm chooses the same few people – about 25 – who will read your posts. Therefore, hold your finger down anywhere in this post and “copy” will pop up. Click “copy”. Then go to your page, start a new post, and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. “Paste” will pop up and click “paste”. This will bypass the system.

If you are reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a quick comment…a “hello,” a sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeed‼️It WORKS!! I don’t know how many friends I have. I just want to see all of your posts that I have been missing and not getting!

The Real Deal

The reason this works is not because they’re copying and pasting the status. In fact, one could say it doesn’t work at all, and that Facebook’s clever algorithm is doing precisely what it was programmed to do, if they saw their friend’s post to begin with, to copy and paste from.

It’s All Binary

From a coding perspective, which is all one can look at in terms of an algorithm, because Facebook is – after all, built upon layers and layers of complex code… it is actually extremely straightforward. It is likely a complicated ‘if, then’ scenario, whereby if a certain thing happens, the code is able to choose from a list of commands to follow afterward. For instance, if Amanda shares Greg’s post, then show more News Feed from Greg to Amanda = yes.

A friend, or someone that another person chooses to follow appears as a list, or a data string to Facebook’s algorithm. It connects a person with all the other people they’re connected to as something like a web, but it doesn’t follow all the paths a web might, it may stop at a few degrees of separation so as not to be inefficient.

Degrees of Separation

This means that someone who is a distant friend, hardly followed, not commented on, and whose posts are not usually liked, would be at a distant point in this web, and would not be ‘targeted’ by Facebook to show posts from. This means, from Facebook’s perspective, a person is only connecting in ways that matter most, with the people they most want to interact with on their platform.

They measure this with the data a user provides often just at account setup, but more as a person increases their connections and experiences using the platform.

Key Data for Engagement

The key data which determines who is seen most often, are as mentioned prior. Sharing is the biggest indicator, then commenting, comments involving just a photo or GIF follow, reactions, and then likes. All of these factors combined, are engagement.

Facebook uses engagement values like these to determine how to rank who appears in a user’s News Feed, and shows them more often thanks to a user’s own usage of the platform.

The Trick

If a user wants to see more from someone long lost to them, they need only go to their profile, and engage with it by commenting, or sharing, or even posting a GIF below one of their posts. The more often a user does these things with people they want to see more of, the more Facebook’s little bot will respond by showing a user more from that person.

The mere fact that the people copying the status saw the post, proves it was already working and there was absolutely no reason to post it.

A Bigger Issue

If the average user doesn’t know how engagement works, it can be reasonably assumed that others don’t either, and we’re aware of business owners who have no idea how social media works, yet use it because they must.

Efforts by people who don’t know how to increase engagement are a wasted venture, because engagement translates to sales in the end, which is what all marketers and advertisers aim for. If a business isn’t tracking these engagement stats, or using them to better their marketing endeavors, then there is a large volume of untapped business there just waiting for the right pitch.

Not Too Late!

It’s not too late to do so, and it’s one of the biggest reasons businesses of all sizes choose to let a third-party handle their social media posts and often their presence on social media, so they don’t have to stay up to date with all the rapid fire changes which happen on social media, and the ever changing landscape.

Some businesses devote their entire effort into handling this with class and grace, which saves a lot of time and money not having to attempt to do it in-house and fail at it anyway.