2021:
Facebook continues to strengthen it’s position against free speech, and uses bots to find ‘offensive speech.’ There is no method to redress mistakes they make by talking to a person, even if your account, page, or post is deleted or banned.
Therefore, we limit the news we share on Facebook. Legitimate news which happens to use words that might trigger Facebook’s many areas of censored speech should not be shared to prevent their making mistakes which we cannot get them to fix. Avoid sharing posts that have, especially in the headline, words like ‘hate speech,’ ‘rape,’ ‘nazi,’ etc, even if the article is about people or events that are ‘against’ those things. Also avoid many health topics, as Facebook bots also are ignorantly violent against these types of posts.
2014:
Facebook, despite recent changes dramatically reducing the reach of posts, remains one of the most important forums for distributing news.
The featured image of an article is the face of the article on Facebook. Facebook posts with images grossly outstrip the performance of posts without images. However, before a Facebook user clicks on a post to read an article, they will read the title to see what the image is about. It makes sense, then, to have an image that will cause a user to read the title, and a title that will almost force a reader to read the article.
About a year ago, Facebook rewrote its algorithm so that even if you publish a post to a Facebook page (which you own) with 10,000 Likes, only 20 of those users who Liked your page will see the post. So how can an article get anywhere on Facebook? Basically, only articles that have significant virality can do anything at all on Facebook. In this sense, we can think of Facebook as a medium only for viral (not necessarily serious) content. Of those 20 people who view a page with 10,000 Likes, if one comments, a few of that user’s friends will see his comment. Same if he likes the post or shares it. These comments/likes/shares must lead immediately to a high number of secondary comments/likes/shares or the post will go no further.
That isn’t to say serious news posts can’t make it on Facebook. Some articles from The Speaker have been shared thousands of times on Facebook.
Think about this: if you saw the post, would you need to share it? Would you feel an urge to press “Like”? Would you need to comment? If you rewrite an article with this in mind, your articles will have a better chance on Facebook (and most social media platforms).
You can also go to Facebook pages and groups and look at what posts people did comment/like/share. These can be misleading (especially on Pages), because they also include posts that are shown to more people by paying Facebook (post advertising).