If you’ve seen pictures going around or your friends complaining about Facebook “hiding” your posts from your friends, than you’ll be interested in understanding the truth.
First of all, they are right in that your news feed is not a comprehensive list of all your FB friends’ posts. There is an algorithm that FB applies to load your news feed. The exact algorithm is based on logic that no one knows besides the FB programmers, but from what we can figure out is it is as follows:
1. If you have a new friend, their statuses are shown to you on your news feed.
2. If you do not “like” or comment on their statuses than their statuses begin to be hidden from your feed.
3. If a particular post of your friend’s gets more traction or likes, it will be shown on your feed. IE someone getting married or the like.
4. If you do not like these posts or comment on them, FB basically determines you are not interested in their posts and hides all of their posts.
This is all balanced and follows the ebb and flow of your likes, but that is the basic idea.
The pictures that promise to get more friends to see your posts work, sorta. They basically will trick the algorithm to think the post is gaining traction as your friends that normally see your post will hopefully all like and comment. The result is that friends that don’t see your posts normally will see your post…
BUT
There’s a cost. Most likely the friends that FB decides to show the post to will decide that the picture is just a “scam” and may not like post. The result is that FB will determine that those friends truly are not interested in your posts and not show them to those friends at all.
So the moral. Just use FB as you normally would and don’t try to trick it. It will have unintended consequences and they probably won’t be positive. FB pays software engineers thousands to ensure the algorithms are always one step ahead.
In the meantime, if you want to see your friends posts that aren’t showing up on your feed, go to more and then most recent.