Question

 

SOCIAL MEDIA ALGORITHM

In today’s evolving world where technology takes a big part in our lives, social media is one of the essential part of one’s daily activity. It’s good to have a background of what shows up on our feed, may it be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even Tiktok. Social media algorithm is a very controversial topic nowadays, knowing that there are a lot of what we so called “Influencers” that their main goal is to get more views, more likes, more shares, or even comments on their posts. Social algorithm is a way of sorting every posts that the users’ sees on their feed based on the relevancy instead of the published time. What do I mean by relevancy? It is about what interests us as users of the social media platform. One good example of this is when you have searched for a particular item on Facebook, after sometime, you tend to see more posts from people for that specific item. Another example of this is that Facebook or Twitter put posts from your closest friends and family front-and-center in your feed because those are the accounts you interact with most often. Why is it controversial? As people believe at this time of pandemic, one of the means for us to acquire news is through Facebook and Twitter because we are too dependent on the social media that we tend to believe everything we see in it. People tend to share posts that are not real or fake. A user who always sees fake news on their timeline, tends to see more and more fake news due to this algorithm, which is a bad thing. If one user who is highly respectable, have lots of followers, and friends on their social media account, shares a post that is not true or is fake, knowing that that person is an influencer, those people that will be reached by that certain post might believe that it is true because the user has high respect for that person who shared the post. And if this happens, many users will share the said post making them believe it is true and the cycle goes on. And we do not want that to occur because it brings panic to some which leads to many more unwanted things. You see, users must understand that this algorithm is an important factor in our daily lives as well. We do not want going around sharing posts that isn’t true or are not verified with facts. We need to learn that when we use the social media, we’re not just simply scrolling or sharing posts because it can affect a whole lot of more things. By default, social media algorithm take the reins of determining which content to deliver to us users based on one’s behavior. As technology becomes more advanced, algorithm-based feeds will become more intelligent and engagement will be the only metric that matters. Love them or hate them, social algorithms are here to stay. Anything you can do to stay in good graces of each network’s algorithm is a plus and a must.

Answer 1

SOCIAL MEDIA ALGORITHM

Social media algorithms are a way of sorting posts in a users feed based on trelevancy instead of publish time

Socila networks prioritize which content a user sees in their feed first by the likelihood that they will actually want to see it

We can add more topics to this subject to make it more useful:

1. WHY DO SOCIAL MEDIA ALGORITHMS SO CONTROVERSIAL?

• Algorithms are so controversial because of their impact on reach
• There are plenty of instances of algorithms seemingly "hiding"content on facebook at random despite being optimized
• On the flip side, there is a well documented phenomenon on you tube of videos surging to millions of views out of nowhere after being recommended to seemingly random viewers

2.WHY DO SOCIAL MEDIA ALGORITHMS EXIST?

• There is a ton of content floating around in the social space.
• Like thousands of posts, photos and videos published per minute
• Without social media algorithms, sifting through all of this contents ona an account by account basis would be impossible.
• Especially for users following hundreds or thousands of accounts on a network, so algorithms do not legwork of delivering what you want and weeding out content that's deemed irrelevant or low quality

3.

HOW DO SOCIAL MEDIA ALGORITHMS WORK?

• Algorithms are as simple as they are complicated
• Sure, the function of an algorithm is to deliver relevant content to users
• But under the hood, algorithms involve machine learning and data science.
• They are capable of parsing data and ranking posts based on criteria that, quite honstly, the average marketer will probably never truly understand'
• Through experimentation and trial and erros we can sniff out changes to any given algorithm.
• For example; some marketers suspect that the instagram algorithm is starting to crack down on brands that are too explicit about social selling and transaction specific posts
• Determining how algorithm work requires both experimenting firsthand and listening to what networks are saying themselves.
• It can be a tedious process, but a necessary one
• INCLUDE MORE TOPICS SUCH AS:
• How to decode social media algorithms etc.