I came across this when some of our articles started going viral on Facebook. I later found out it was because they were appearing in Facebook's "Suggested for You" column on the news feed.
Not only does appearing in that column give you lots of exposure, some of the content could end up going viral on their own after that.
How Facebook's "Suggested for You" column looks like
Posts appearing on Facebook's "suggested for you" section are purely algorithmic, meaning the platform automatically decides how content appears.
Over the past few months, I've experimented on different pieces of content to try to replicate its effectiveness, and I believe i have found a way to crack it.
Here are some of the criteria to getting into the "suggested for you" box:
Only Facebook page posts From what I noticed, these posts are mostly Facebook page posts, and NOT personal profile posts. Unless the engagement on the personal profile post is very high, it probably would never appear.
High niche engagement ratio Most of these posts typically have engagements from a very concentrated group / niche of people. In other words, Facebook will "recommend" the post to similar people who engaged with your post, if they're able to identify their niche segment.
From data we collected on our own posts, we found that the topics must be relevant to your Facebook page's niche (ie: gaming / esports), and the ratio of "people reached" vs "post engagements" must be higher than average for algorithms to categorize them as "popular" and "relevant".
News and long-form articles I noticed most of the posts that appear in the suggested for you column are either news or long-form articles.
So unless Facebook has categorized your page as being a legitimate news page, you'll probably have to stick to helpful/useful articles or highly engaging niche content.
For links, I believe Facebook also keeps track on the amount of time spent on the page before returning to the news feed (bounce rate). People should stay on your site at least 5 seconds or longer, and have scrolled to a certain depth to be considered legitimate.
Non sensitive topics Facebook algorithms are particularly careful to avoid the distribution of certain topics - especially political / negative-sentiment ones. Avoid these.
Whitelisted Articles
Posts must be "white-listed" by Facebook, meaning they have either gone through internal "screening" (they have an automated system for this), or it went through the ad review process.
In summary, posts should be relevant to a specific niche, have above average engagement, and are "allowed" to distribute organically by Facebook.
