Finding most engaging content on Facebook?

Facebook search is abysmal, but it's not really their fault, seeing as they have over 1 billion active users for every month.

Consider a simple scenario which takes all of 5 minutes at the most:

1. You upload a picture
   
2. You add it to an album
   
3. You tag person #1 in the picture
   
4. You tag person #2 in the picture
   
5. You add a caption to the picture
   
6. You change your background image to that picture
   
7. Person #1 hits like on the picture
   
8. Person #2 hits like on the picture
   
9. Person #1 also comments on the picture
   
10. Person #2 shares it

In this extremely simple scenario, there are 10 separate things that happen. And there are actually more, because everyone on your friends list gets a notification that you've uploaded a new picture, and everyone on Person #1's friends list gets a notification of their comment, and everyone on Person #2's friends list sees the shared image as a part of their experience. If you and Person #1 and Person #2 all have 1000 friends (a pretty typical number), and only half of your friends are in common, then this extremely simple thing that's been done results in thousands of actions.

Every single one of these actions is automatically entered into Facebook's database. For that's what Facebook is (and many sites are, I might add, and Able2Know is one of them): it's a database with an interesting interface. Every time you comment on Facebook or do any of the actions I've outlined above, Facebook gets a new row in their database.

Your single 5 minute set of actions just added thousands of new rows to the database. But there are far more than 5 minutes in a day, and you're not the only Facebook user.

As you can imagine, the database has trillions of rows by now, and might even be in the quadrillions or the quintillions - no exaggeration.

However, a search can't comb through all of those rows because it would be so inefficient that it would crash the servers. So instead, you are usually served a pretty small subset of the database, and it's often something you have a connection with.

Therefore, if you search for 'horse' and your friend mentioned a horse last year, you're probably going to be served that as a search result. You're a lot less likely to be served any time that I mentioned a horse because we are (most likely) not connected at all. You'll also be served the names of groups and pages which match your keyword. So there might be a group called 'Horse Lovers of Europe' (I'm just making that up; I have no idea if there is such a group on Facebook) and you're pretty likely to be served that as a search result as well.

So - with all of that having been said - how do you find engaging content? The truth is, a lot of it is hit or miss. You might get information from friends (or for marketing research, from customers). You might also get information from experts in the area. For example, if your company had something to do with the movies, then you might do well to find groups and pages devoted to actors or directors you admire. If your company is all about asphalt, then you might want to not only search on asphalt on Facebook, but also on Google. You could explore whatever's out there from respected trade journals in your field, too.

I realize this is probably a lot more than anyone ever wanted to know about how Facebook works, but that's it, in a nutshell.

Facebook, I might add, does its best to deliver you the content it thinks you want to see. The best way to direct it is to like, share, block, hide, and comment on various posts, topics, and in groups and pages, and also to post about it yourself. If you want to get information about horses, then giving Facebook social signals that you like horse topics will help to direct the things they deliver to you as a result of a search. And if you don't want to see other topics (about zebras, maybe), then by hiding or blocking pages and groups, you can also give the Facebook database signals that it can read and act upon.

Wow. Thank you so much for very detailed answer!

Oh, my pleasure 😊 My MS is in this stuff.