“I have an impression that I’m not seeing posts from friends I used to connect with. Someone told me that FB blocks your friends if you have regularly connected with them.”
This question came up on our Visibility That Sells Accelerator coaching call yesterday.

This is something that is important to be fully aware of if you want your visibility efforts to have maximum efficiency.

Facebook as a platform, in fact, really wants us to have a great experience. So it has this algorithm in place to analyse what we engage with (this indicates to the system that we are interested in the user or content creator that we physically engage with) and Facebook starts showing us more posts from these sources, and less of those that we show no interest about.

It would be fair to establish that reading minds has not yet been what artificial intelligence as we know it is capable of just yet.

The only way it can know what interest us is by analysing ENGAGEMENT ACTIVITIES:

Here are the activities that count towards the engagement from most to least. These are my own theory developed over marketing my own business using Facebook organically and testing, trying and observing various connections and actions related to the topic.

1. Private Conversations In Messenger
2. Comments on posts
3. Shares of posts
4. Video views
5. Emoji reactions on posts
6. Clicks on “Read More” to open a long-form post or caption.

If we do not take any of the actions above, we are sending Facebook a signal that the user/Page/group are not of much interest to us.

It is THAT simple. So if you lost touch with your followers/connections/friends on Facebook – it is likely that neither them NOT YOU engaged with each other’s posts for a while.

Do you see my point? There is so much control over manipulating the algorithm to help you get maximum visibility, but like any achievement in life, it is not entirely FREE.
It will cost you some time and effort to stay in touch with those in your virtual world if you want them to see your posts also.

HOW can you achieve this in a systematic way? It can feel overwhelming, especially if you have A LOT of connections.

One of my personal systems is using Friends Lists. This is a 10-15 min activity I do every day when on my computer (it is not available on the mobile app).

Friends lists have their own little Newsfeed that will only show posts from the people in this list and – here is an interesting part I observed – seemingly only since you checked that mini Newsfeed the last time.

You can add specific people you want to stay in touch with into a friends list. Just go to their profile and click on the “Friends” button, and you will see an option there.

How to use Friends Lists most efficiently

You can add people in lists based on their relation to you. Friends. Family. Work Colleagues. People who you have taken a specific training with. People you met at a specific event. You get an idea, right?

You can even just have one list for all people for a similar group – for example, people you met through other programs with, no need to segment too much.
You can add specific people you want to stay in touch with into a friends list by a FB group if you are specific about who you are connecting and using Groups to grow your audience.

Then you create a schedule of what day you will be working with each of your Friends Lists. You may have 12 lists and decide that Mon/Wed/Fri you will work with specific 4 lists.
You can then use mini-Newsfeeds for those Friends Lists to manageable engage with the posts, the lists’ members have recently created and re-engage the algorithm.

Just have a good look at my hierarchy of engagement activities. The top 2 are the most effective.

While messaging people without a proper human reason is NOT what I stand for, some of the people you will see in those lists may are long overdue a little chit chat. Especially your real friends and family. Your current or past clients. Your strategic connections.

Keep in mind that another way you can private message people without feeling weird is merely by replying to their stories.

And for the rest make sure you leave a comment on one (and just one) of their recent posts. It will send them a notification with your name in it, so it not just boosts the algorithm – it helps them feel validated for sharing whatever they posted.

And THAT is how we build relationships – the foundation of client attraction, which is deeply rooted in not just creating content, but creating and nurturing those relationships.