What Is a Social Media Algorithm and How Does It Work 2025
your grandma’s hundred cats on Instagram as well as her best friends dog, your old colleague’s little dog, your college friends even littler dog, and your best friends really terrible dog all posted in the last hour.
News feeds would be chaotic and overwhelming.
Algorithms exist to curate the millions of posts, videos, pictures, hashtags, and messages users encounter on a daily basis.
More importantly, however, it’s so users spend the maximum amount of time on the app so the platform can make the most profit from ad revenue.
The amount of user-generated content is enormous. Statista reports that around 277 million people post every month on Instagram. The platform can’t show you every post, hence limiting the impressions each post can receive. Platforms love when you post, comment, like, or use proof of your interaction to keep you glued to your screen.
What Makes a Good Algorithm?
An effective social media algorithm should exhibit qualities such as:
Relevance: The post should contain content relevant to users while also published by credible accounts/pages
Engagement: An algorithm determines the post’s relevancy based on the number of likes, shares, saves, and comments, not on just the time it was published
Post History: The user’s previous feedback on similar posts and whether they have engaged with
that account before are vital in establishing the content algorithm.
Constant Change
Algorithms are constantly evolving over time.
Facebook’s algorithm has gone through countless changes in the last decade having started as a basic recursive algorithm
sorting content chronologically and has become a sophisticated recommendation algorithm.
Different algorithms also affect processing speed when the algorithm is run and user-response all while delivering relevancy through engagement.
Change comes from a multitude of different variables such as trends amongst users which change whether or not a given situation or environment is relevant.
Why are social media platforms using algorithms?
Originally, most social media platforms accepted posts in chronological order.
With the growth of users and volume of content, it became clear people simply could not keep up when they followed too many people.
It would be hard to keep up with the posts of 1000 people because there are hundreds and hundreds of posts every hour of individuals you follow.
To help users keep track of the deluge of content happening on these platforms, algorithms were established to help filter down content to your most relevant stuff to provide a personalized and engaging user experience.
In turn social media platforms benefit when users spend a longer period of time on their site have
more data to collect, and of course, more advertising revenue
What Factors Will Social Media Algorithms Consider?
Even though every social media platform will all use different methods often based on their algorithm there are some common factors found in algorithms that will determine how they work
User engagement
Engagement is always one of the biggest indicators in social media algorithms.
Likes, comments, shares and saves and even the amount of time spent looking at a post all count as engagement.
The more engagement the content receives, the more valuable it is, and future posts from people will be shown as it has more weight.
Relevance
Algorithms will try to show you content that they believe aligns with your interests.
For example, if you engage or have engaged frequently with a person’s posts related to travel you will be more likely to see content similar to this in your feeds.
The platforms are observing how long and…
as part of an attempt to keep viewers captivated for as long as possible.
Twitter
The Twitter feed is likely the most controversial feed in social media as considerations of recency and relevance collide. Recency is important to Twitter since up-to-the-minute news and updates are tweets’ contrived purpose. But what seems to take precedence are the factors of relevance such as engagement, likes, and shares.
It relies on signals emitted from audience interactions based on their liking of tweets and accounts with the hope to keep users using Twitter as long as possible.
Big Data, Machine Learning Concepts, and Algorithms
There are a variety of machine learning concepts that are relevant to algorithms worth pointing out. Either driven by big data or machine learning alone they identify and learn patterns (inappropriate or proper).
These concepts include falling on a typical classification or regression approaches that use algorithms and mathematical operations to look for patterns in data.
Libraries or frameworks that people use are often many levels deep and have a lot of picks and choices on machine learning algorithms.
Its important to acknowledge that library inspired approaches to development rely heavily on
datasets – not algorithms; so all datasets, algorithms, models, and tests, matter.
Big Data and the Common Data Science Pipeline
You don’t need a PhD in computer science to understand your algorithmic and machine learning-related methodologies.
In three broad categories Transform, Train Tailor: Transform/tidy data into a data frame; trained
different algorithms classifying problems as far as suitable accuracy metric/purpose built framework using result metrics tailor to the problem intended to establish ‘measurements; and then measure comparisons.
Increment Goals
Social media algorithms reward active accounts.
When someone frequently posts, it indicates to the algorithm that the account is in active use, and the algorithm will prioritize that person’s content accordingly.
Produce Quality Content
When users engage with, watch, or talk about your content it reinforces that post’s worth to the algorithm.
An important theme to remember, of course, is that it is better to focus on quality than quantity.
Utilize Hashtags and Key Words
Hashtags and keywords are ways to categorize your content so when the algorithm categorizes your content it can also serve it to the audience that will be interested.
Engage Your Audience
It is important to engage with your audience so if comments are left on a post, spring up the offer
you have mentioned, engage and comment on other people’s post and share appropriate content from others!
You will gain interaction and grow your reach, therefore getting more aware of your presence and
learning if they engage the algorithm will recognize you as an active player in their community.
Try and Analyze
Review your analytics, consider what type of content would perform best.
Try some things out, test the waters, consider different formats, captions, and times of day when creating content to understand engagement and audience interactions.
Commonly Believed Myths About Social Media Algorithms
There is so much misunderstanding regarding algorithms, let’s clear up a few common myths:
Myth 1 - The Algorithm Purposely Informs People of Your Posts
False. Essentially, the algorithm promotes posts to cater when it realizes users prefer, more activity leads to busier accounts.
Myth 2 - Only Paid Posts Can Reach Your Audience
Sure, advertising helps you reach more users, but even organic posts can just as easily go viral as they relate to users.
Myth 3 - The Algorithm Only Changes Randomly and is Always Different
Yes, platforms make changes to stay current and keep the user in better standing, however,The Future of Social Media Algorithms
As technology changes in the future, it is expected that social media algorithms will become more personalized and predictive.
Social media platforms are already using AI and machine learning to analyze your clicks and interactions as well as the nuance of your facial expressions, voice tones, and even emotions in videos.
This will lead to smarter recommendations, increased automation, and even more questions surrounding privacy and data use.
In the future, social platforms may give customers more control over their feed setting options, typically algorithm-driven options and the ability to show content chronologically, etc.
Conclusion
Social media algorithms are powerful tools that dictate what we see online.
Social media algorithms can sometimes be nearly unfathomable in their mechanics
and operations but at their core they exist to show you the content found to be of the most value or enjoyment to you.
Understanding social media algorithms can help you, as a casual user, or even as a content creator, make educated decisions about what to post, when to post, and how to engage with others.
