Facebook's Algorithm Turned A Sham LLC Into A Publishing Powerhouse Overnight

Facebook Laptop
If you ever wonder how certain pages or posts end in your Facebook feed, they drop their most widely viewed content reports quarterly. In the Q3 report a blogger has found that the most widely viewed page in the US, which has posted the third, fourth and eighth most viewed posts, is a page ran by a food blogger from Utah.

The page is called Thinkarete Lifestyle and now mostly posts links to a website selling cookware and other home goods—we can assume this is mostly a drop shipping sort of deal. What's interesting here is this isn't what you would call a dead page, having a bot post content every so often but mostly linking its own affiliate links or webstore. This is a page that actively comments and reacts to other posts. This might be how it gets the engagement it does. Facebook could treat it like a 'real page' over a brand that mostly just publishes its own content.

Facebook Algorithm Post
With the fact it posts links to an e-commerce three times an hour 24 hours a day and posts actual content around two times a month shows how easily the system can be gamed if done properly. The page, according to the source, is a some woman's side hustle to make extra money, which in current times is understandable. However, the implication here is that at random you can go from sharing recipes to being the largest publisher on Facebook overnight just because they flipped some switches. Or imagine the inverse—you're a business owner supporting many employees and one day Facebook changes some switches and your business dries up.

These aren't really risks that everyone can mitigate and it means people need to spend even more time scrutinizing over how to get their content out to people over how to make that content or product actually better. The fact that the system can be gamed so easily with such little effort and reach those sorts of view counts is kind of shocking and can show how once you fall within good standing of the algorithm it takes little work to keep up the momentum.