Also called feed ranking, recommendation system
In social media, the algorithm is the ranking system deciding which posts each person sees and in what order, based on predicted engagement.
It is a prediction engine, not a judge of quality. It estimates how likely you are to react to a given post and orders the feed accordingly, using your past behaviour, the post's early performance and hundreds of other signals.
Early signals matter disproportionately. How the first cohort of viewers behaves — watch time, saves, shares — largely determines how wide distribution goes, which is why posting when your audience is awake has an outsized effect.
Because the system changes without notice, building a business that depends entirely on it is a structural risk rather than a tactical one.
In practice
Two identical posts published six hours apart can reach audiences differing by an order of magnitude, purely from early engagement.
Common mistake
Rebuilding a content strategy after every rumoured change. Most reported changes are noise, and the fundamentals move slowly.
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