The Facebook Algorithm’s Mom ProblemOr how “smart” algorithms can get your audience wrong. I suspect this is especially true on Facebook where people’s “Friends” tend to include people in very different social circles, from immediate family, to old school classmates, to professional colleagues. Here’s the problem:I write my content on my own personal site. I automatically syndicate it to Facebook. My mom, who seems to be on Facebook 24/7, immediately clicks “like” on the post. The Facebook algorithm immediately thinks that because my mom liked it, it must be a family related piece of content–even if it’s obviously about theoretical math, a subject in which my mom has no interest or knowledge.So the algorithm then is more likely to show it to other family members, rather than other “friends”. Those family members automatically “like” the post, reinforcing that they are the audience.The result? The folks who would actually be interested in the post aren’t actually likely to see it.The solution is posting to a more limited group (or everyone minus mom), and then later making it public.Now I do think that using an algorithm to provide “top posts” or otherwise rank posts is usually a good thing – if done well. I rarely have time to look at every post from the people I’m following here on Google+ (or on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube), so it is a good thing to see the posts I’m most likely to be interested in first.But algorithms have to be quite clever to figure out what I’m actually interested in. And they clearly need to be better.Read more from +Chris Aldrich http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/