The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

Facebook Algorithm 2025: Reach Non Followers, AI & the Future…expert advice from Mari Smith

• Louise McDonnell • Season 1 • Episode 66

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In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, Louise talks with Mari Smith, world renowned  speaker, author, trusted advisor to Meta, and widely known as the Queen of Facebook.

Mari shares her expert insights on where Facebook is heading, how the algorithm is evolving, and what businesses need to do in 2025 to stay ahead. From organic reach to AI-powered ads, she breaks it all down with clarity and honesty.

You’ll learn:
✅ What Meta’s AI-powered recommendation engine means for reach
✅ How to get in front of non-followers with the right content
✅ The difference between professional mode and business pages
✅ Why Facebook ads still outperform other platforms
✅ How to prepare your content and messaging for 2025

Is Facebook still worth your time? Tune in for an insightful conversation that will change how you think about Meta.

SHOW CHAPTERS
01:00 Why Facebook Is Still Relevant in 2025
03:00 Facebook vs TikTok – Are the Lines Blurring?
06:00 Age Demographics and Platform Use
07:00 How Facebook's Algorithm Has Changed
09:00 Business Pages vs Professional Mode Profiles
12:00 Meta’s £65 Billion AI Investment
14:00 AI Tools for Organic, Video, and Ads
17:00 Advantage+ and Smart Retargeting
18:00 Content Quality and Message Alignment
20:00 The New Rules of Reach and Organic vs Paid
23:00 Concerns Around AI Bots and Future of the Platform
26:00 Where Meta Is Heading Next

Connect with Mari:
Facebook
Instagram

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

My 2025 Social Media Content Planner & Guide is now available! Packed with 400 content prompts, expert tips, and $377 worth of free resources to help you save time and get results in 2025.

Grab your copy now on Amazon!
Amazon UK
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Louise McDonell:

So today I am absolutely honored to be joined by a lady who is known as the Queen of Facebook. Mari Smith is widely known as the premier Facebook marketing expert and a top social media thought. Leader, in fact, even Facebook, ask for her help. She is an in-demand keynote speaker, dynamic live webinar host savvy corporate social media strategist and trainer, and popular brand ambassador. And she's also the author of the New Relationship Marketing. Mari, you are so welcome to the show.

Mari Smith:

Thank you, Louise. I am really looking forward to our chat today and thanks for having me on.

Louise McDonell:

My pleasure. Okay, so let's get straight into it. Mari I'm actually so dying to have this conversation with you. People when they talk to me about social media, 'cause they know that's what I do. And like for years now they've been saying, but your Facebook shirt that's gone now. Yeah. And like I was just looking up the stats today before we came on. Like it's still the most used social media platform in the world. Yeah. It's got over 3 billion users. Put that in context. That's double to what TikTok currently have. And a billion more than what Instagram have. So why do people think it's on the way out?

Mari Smith:

They've got like a filter on, like they've got blinders on. Sometimes in our own little circles, the filter bubble, they sometimes call it. If you see a lot of people in your immediate circles, complaining about. Low reach or Facebook's done this or they've changed that, or I used to be able to do this and now I can't and pay to play. And it's just riddled with political posts and misinformation. And now we've got the flood of ai. I think it's. Quite comical that the word slop has become, now a term AI slop is just like filler content. That's jamming our feeds. And I'm seeing a big uptick in that where you're getting these pages, these creators, influencers, or just general people cracking the code with the meta algorithms by creating AI generated content and getting. Tons and tons of views. Yeah, I hear that too, Louise. I hear, Facebook's for old people, but then they kinda laugh. It's okay, wait a minute. Old is like 30, 35 and up, and so it's yeah, I've been, doing this Facebook thing since 2007, so 18 years and I'm in my late fifties and it tries my patience. I'll be honest with you, there are days where it just breaks my heart to see, small business owners and marketers where they've really put their heart and so blood, sweat, and tears into their business marketing, building the platform, building the followers on Facebook, maybe Instagram as well. And now they're just getting royally screwed. There is hope, there is good news. There is a radical change in the algorithms and the meta calls it the AI powered discovery engine or recommendation engine. So yeah, you wanna explore that a

Louise McDonell:

little bit? Yeah. I just wanna get your opinion on this. Do you feel Facebook was always different because it was the place where you built community. It was the place where people went and they connected with their school friends, their college friends, the first cousins, their second cousins. And for many, like I would say to people I nearly have a stronger relationship with my second cousin sometimes than my first, because we formed that relationship on Facebook, and that's one of the things I loved about Facebook. And that's when I used to teach people, I'd say it's a community platform, but. More. And I still love it, by the way. And we still use it all the time. I just wonder, sometimes I go, I'm in Facebook, and I'm like going, where am I? Am I on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? Has it lost its differentiation factor a little bit? Is it just trying to be the same as everything else?

Mari Smith:

Very much there's no question. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most competitive people on the planet. He's absolutely obsessed with, Roman emperors. He named three of his daughters after Roman emperors. And in the early days, he would go around the office chanting dominate, the organization, the leaders, they can't stand that TikTok is so successful with. The time on site with the short form videos, and a lot of features on Facebook and Instagram have been blatantly copied. Of course, the ephemeral stories came from Snapchat and then also the AI Power Discovery Engine. This whole concept of recommending content to people versus who you've chosen to follow and to friend that's directly copied from TikTok, I remember it was gosh, what year was it? It might have been 2020, the head of Instagram came right out and publicly said, TikTok is the most formidable competitor we've ever seen, it's always blown my mind. Why now? 20 years in, now, the Facebook, now met a parent company. The answer always seems to be either acquire like WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, whatever, acquire the competitor or just absolutely copy them. And like you just said, now it just becomes homogenous because it's like, what is the differentiator on Facebook if I can get the same content or the same experience, other than like you mentioned. Connecting with real family, friends and so on and so forth. I always do the mom test. My mom's in her early eighties and I always think of people are, okay, blue sky, and I'm like over there like at the water cooler. Crickets. Okay, everybody's not over here. Even threads, meta's answer to Twitter X. But I was like, okay, my mom. Say that's it. I'm not gonna use Facebook. I'm going over to Blue Sky. Nope. No way. Not gonna happen.

Louise McDonell:

in fact I see the, like my mom and dad are on it, and my generation are on it. now I've seen I have two 17 year olds who's turning 17 at the end of this month. what I see happening with them is they're involved with sport and the teams like the clubs, they're putting out the club reports every week. So now they're hopping on. I see every age profile on Facebook, and I suppose I just wanted to start the show because in order for people to pay attention to what we're saying about it, they have to believe that it's still relevant. And it is for us, it's still the number one driver of business for our agency clients. Meta ads are still the most cost effective way to run ads. But Mari, for any small business person or large business person who's tuning into this episode. What do they need to pay attention to in 2025 to make their strategy effective?

Mari Smith:

This is where this algorithm comes into play because I periodically tune into Gary Vener, Chuck, I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with him. Longtime industry friend of mine and I don't always pay attention to him, but every now and again he comes across and I start going into his YouTubes the only AI I'm most excited about is AI driven. Algorithms never before in the history of social media have agencies, brands, businesses of all sizes had this opportunity where you can test at scale. You can, put your initial resources into. Amazing, compelling, relevant, thumb stopping content blasted out into the algorithms and see what gets picked up because the most important metric. The way this whole system is working right now is non followers. Okay, I got 5,000 followers, or 50,000 or 500,000, whatever your follower number is, pay close attention to that. Usually it's a little like donut chart, the little circle that shows you, oh, like 20% followers and 80% non followers. Wow, that's fantastic. So marketers of all sizes, whether you're just starting out, you're small, you're large, you're medium, the name of the game is now. Create amazing content and you can test like crazy. In fact, on Instagram you probably know those trial reels are calling them and I've seen mixed reports, so I don't know about you, Louise, if you've had any success with that or your clients, but the idea is you can put. To non followers first 24 or 48 hours, if the algorithms love it, then you can just flip a switch and now it can go to your actual followers. And so I think. Invariably we'll see a feature come out on Instagram, and if it does well, at some point it will come to Facebook. And so that's the main thing is if you are not getting a lot of reach and views by non followers, I'm sorry to see, but probably you're posting. Boring content.

Louise McDonell:

Yeah. Good content. Always performs regardless. And interestingly enough, like another thing that has really occurred to me over the years about Facebook when Facebook started, first of all, we had. Personal profiles. You had your friends, and then a business page had likes or followers. That was a business page. And that was a separate entity to your personal profile. And then we've had groups. And then in the last few years, they've introduced professional profiles. Where are you seeing people getting the success? Is it on the business pages where it's a brand or is it through the professional profiles? The personalities within the brand are pushing their own content because it's coming more from a person. Where are you seeing that the success there?

Mari Smith:

Yeah, I wish hand on heart that I could say, oh my gosh, I got like dozens of examples of the business pages doing so well, crushing it, getting all this reach. But unfortunately it really isn't. It does tend to be the whole pay to play. Approach on the public business pages. And so just for clarity, what you're talking about, of course, the professional mode or pro mode for short, that's Facebook's little trickery to capture the majority of individuals. Creators, entrepreneurs, independent professionals, whatever it may be, but they're in business, right? They're using Facebook for business reasons and, but they either did not have a public business page or they created one and it plateaued, or they created one and they just abandoned it. So all of a sudden, a couple years ago now, maybe it's several years that Facebook started to test this thing out, and what professional mode is. Basically functions almost identically to a page. You can boost posts, you get metrics, you get access to their bonus programs, if that's of interest to you and monetizing your content. That's always the carrot that they dangle. One example in particular good industry, friend of mine you might know is Austin Armstrong. He has an AI company. He used to have an agency and then he let the agency go and he's all in on this AI video editing tool syllabi. And so Austin somehow amassed a million followers on his. Personal profile in professional mode. And he and I were just chatting the dms recently, and he got something like 300 million views in the last 28 days, 99% of which were non followers. Wow. And something's cool that those are not even reels. Yes, reels can do well. They tend to do well on Instagram, they can do well on Facebook on the professional mode personal profile. But he's doing this really interesting strategy. I'm seeing a number of folks do, where it's the large font on the color. Background, he tends to just use black and then they're using it like Threads or Twitter where it's just a sentence or a big bold hook. And then all the value is in the comments. Like the first 5, 6, 10 comments. It's like that's what the algorithms are picking up and giving a lot of views. And obviously it takes a bit of time to trip the algorithm. It's not like we're suggesting run out and do that right now and you're gonna get a million followers and bazillions of views. But yeah. That's what I'm seeing is working in some places.

Louise McDonell:

And I know I watched you speak at the Social Media Marketing World Conference last year in San Diego, and one of the things you talked about was the investment that Meta has made in ai. And I was just actually looking up the figures today. So this year alone, they're spending 65 billion on ai. Like what does that mean for businesses using Facebook and Instagram? Like how is that changing the platform and what should we know about?

Mari Smith:

I think meta ai, a lot of people are like chatting with it on the messenger very much how folks are using chat, GBT, of course US marketers and business people. Generally speaking, we are using chat GBT 'cause it was a. Basically the first to market. But Meta AI is a pretty strong competitor. So it does have its place for doing all the things that you would use any kind of AI assistant You can go to meta.ai or you can activate a chat right inside Messenger. I personally don't find it helpful to have all those little prompts underneath everybody's posts because it takes you away from the post, and all of a sudden you're in a dialogue with the ai, we will see on the organic side like user public facing as opposed to what we're talking about, the AI powered algorithms. We're all at the mercy of that. But I'm very interested to see what they're gonna do with the movie Jan that's gonna be directly competitive with OpenAI, people can just google that meta AI movie gen and it sets their text. To video editor, it looks phenomenal. What they're gonna be able to do with that. I think at some point soon we're gonna be able to just go to Meta Business Suite, put in a little prompt, boom, there's some generated content, whether it's image, whether it's video, and because Meta has the power, they have the money, to invest these extraordinary amounts. There's the third part. So that's the organic, that's the video. Then there's the ads Anywhere you see Advantage Plus, and this is part of your area of expertise advantage Plus Facebook really wants advertisers just go, Hey, hands off the wheel. We'll do the steering for you. And they'll find your audience. They'll maximize, they'll optimize, they'll tweak your copy. They'll give you, copy versions and they'll tweak your images, your videos, optimize placements. But the thing that I am most. Eager to see rollout. Big time is the business ai, so the meta business assistance, the AI assistance specifically for business. What it's gonna do is grab all your content from your business page, your Instagram and your WhatsApp, so you can get it trained up on your knowledge base. And now this is gonna provide a pre. Sales, a postsales, even like in the midst of an interaction or a transaction. Someone's going to make a purchase and now they're like interacting with this business. Ai. That to me is two thumbs way up, and it can't roll out soon enough because yeah, if we can use these tools to increase our revenue to increase sales, that's a big win. I would say.

Louise McDonell:

I've seen the meta ai. I think the algorithm in Facebook is amazing actually for ads. If you can start spending money, we all say to our clients, start spending money, start building awareness because you're training the algorithm to identify the people who are interested in your content. So engagement is so important now. if they stop, if they read, if they click, if they watch, if they dwell, the algorithm learns that. And so that's true. Then when you're running ads, it automatically retargets. That to me is super, so in the past we used to be creating retargeting audiences. You don't need to do it anymore. I think that when you see an advertiser, let's say go to totally new let's say country geography, new area, then sometimes they're back to square one again. It doesn't seem to join the dots. So I think the algorithm, this is just a hunch I have. I also feel that the algorithm on Facebook, if you run an ad from Facebook and run it across to Instagram, you get much better results than if you run the ad. On Instagram and you just do a quick promotion on Instagram. So I kinda have this impression that the algorithm on Facebook is by far the best across all the social media platforms. So for sure that retargeting is fantastic. The AI assists with the ads. No, I'm not hugely convinced about yet. I'm like, okay, go for it. And then one of my clients' ads popped up to me at one point, and it was like. Totally inappropriate music. I was like, Jeannie Mac. No way. So yeah, I don't think they're quite there with that yet, but yeah, I'm sure they will look 65 billion if they'll get their door. Yeah,

Mari Smith:

I agree. And just real quick on that, that Advantage Plus audience, like I say, meta wanting us to just go hands off. Yeah. Okay. You can put controls on it. Say, okay, it has to be, 18 and over, or 21 and older, or it has to be this specific. Zip code or whatever geographic area, but otherwise have at, go for it, man. People that I didn't even know that were my target audience, but I've heard a number of folks say, I tried that and my audience is a hundred percent women. And It was like, whoa, okay. Yeah. Sometimes you have to make sure that you do put some of those parameters in place, those controls, but it might not be fully ready for prime time. Meta's always. Iterating and pushing us to move fast and break things has been their motto forever.

Louise McDonell:

I think what happens when you see that happening is that if their ad creative is appealing to that age profile or that gender, and that's not aligned with what the advert is trying to achieve, the algorithm's gonna learn, oh, men are responding to this lovely image or this lovely creative, and they're gonna find more of the people who respond. So I think a lot of the problem with success in terms of marketing is down to messaging. And aligning your creatives with your messaging. So you talk about the new rules of reach. So for anyone who's sitting there going, oh, please Mari, tell me how on earth can I start creating this content, really good content to get beyond my followers. How do you do it?

Mari Smith:

Yeah, you definitely want to embrace some ai. Whatever your AI assistant of choice is. For most people it's chat, GPT, but there's many other choices out there too. And so it's really come up with those ultra compelling hooks. And I would say follow other people in your industry, but not just your vertical. Keep an eye on other, I call it intentional scrolling. Be really careful you don't get sucked into the machine. And they literally have this god awful term now called brain rot, It's mental health is such an important area now, but I do literally call it intentional scrolling, where you're looking at your feeds, whatever platform you're scrolling and you're literally looking through the eyes of, okay, what is catching my eye as being really compelling or is getting some great engagement, or is oh, that's a cool approach, for example, my friend John Jantz the founder of Duct Tape Marketing. And yeah, I think he recently had his daughter take over the business. He's retiring and a lot of people know duct Tape Marketing, but I saw an ad that he was running on Instagram. I'm sure it was on Facebook too, but I saw on my Instagram feed and it was for an ungated lead magnet. And I'm like, a number of marketers are doing this strategy to the point where some people were messaging me.'cause I tried my own little ungated methodology and it's like, why would somebody run ads to an ungated, lead magnet. But it was so cool. It was like a five minute video so he only ran the ad just very briefly.'cause then I couldn't find it. And back in the behind where, you can see in the ads on somebody's page. But right under this video was the calendar. He had his calendar link to book your strategy call. And I'm like, that's really smart actually. So it was really clever. Anyway, I don't know if I'm answering your question? The new rules of reach. Yeah. So my point is. Hooks really good hooks using the AI tool of choice. And that's what I'm saying, the intentional scrolling to see what's catching your eye, but also be careful what I'm calling new rules of reach is we're reaching those non followers. That's what we wanna do on the organic site, but please don't over obsess on. That and put so much resources in that, because what I would rather see people do if you've got a limited budget, is work with Louise and do ads. Because that's where I feel the pain of so many small business owners where they're striving to do social media marketing that is. Very dated. It's like at least five, if not sometimes 10 years old, where it's we gotta get followers and let's share link posts and let's, oh, nobody's seeing our stuff, so let's just post more stuff and then eventually we'll get them into our funnel. No, just the heck with all that mess. Just go straight for getting them in your funnel and do really good ad campaigns and then just do some organic to maintain a good presence. That's one strategy and I would recommend it for the vast majority of businesses, quite frankly.

Louise McDonell:

So you might not have huge or organic reach, but it's your portfolio. It's a place where people can go and check out what you're about and what you're doing right now. And then you're paid promotions. They're your opportunity if you're not going viral. spend some money on ads. And here's the thing about the ads. I'll say if your ad is good and you put it out there. You won't have to spend a huge amount sometimes to have massive reach because if your content is good and the algorithm just hasn't picked up on it, then it'll still perform really well. Mind you, if it's crap and you put money to it, you're just potentially wasting your money. That's right. Yeah, totally. very true. So the new rules of reach, I suppose for me, the new rules are reach. Facebook doesn't owe you reach. No, it doesn't owe you anything. And it's there to make money, but don't see your ad as a cost, see it as an investment. Exactly.

Mari Smith:

If you're not getting a positive ROI on your ads, I see this to people all the time. If you don't get a positive ROI, minimum, like to me, minimum would be two x. I know some clients that get, they're happy with 1.7 x or whatever. I don't. I do minimal ads for my own business, but I don't run ads for people and I don't even claim to be an ads expert. I leave that to people like you. But people say, oh my God, I spent all this money. Somebody told me, oh, I spent 10 grand. They're working with some agency and they're like, we still haven't seen an ROI. And they're like, blaming Facebook. I'm like, oh my god. Whoa. We need to talk, a user error here.

Louise McDonell:

And where do you see it all going then? Mari?

Mari Smith:

Gosh. I felt a little slump in my heart there, in my gut because unfortunately where I see it all going is with the prevalence of ai. I think that the. Creators accounts, businesses that are really gonna win at this AI powered algorithm, are the ones that are cranking out enormous amounts of AI produced content. For example, there is a page that comes across my awareness every now and again. Is it Chelsea High Tower? I think she's a celebrity ballroom dancer. It's not even her page. If it was her page that got hacked, it's taken over and then they purport to be. This person as an animal activist and the page is just riddled with these AI created animal stories where you think all these baby animals are getting rescued and it's got millions of comments and reach and shares and views and that's what meta wants eyeballs on the screen. So there's that one category where you just go, okay. You can't beat them, join them. We're just gonna produce boatloads of ai, generated content and see if we can game the algorithm. That's one side. And the other side that kind of makes me have that sinking heart is that Facebook themselves are putting out these AI created profiles and they're actually coming. Right out and saying, yeah, it's gonna interact with you as if it's a real person. And they started to put some out and then they pulled some back. But I'm sure at some point it'll be all systems go and the whole platform, all these platforms will just be riddled with you don't even know if they're real people or AI people, or maybe their AI people can talk to your AI people and then we'll just go, forget it.

Louise McDonell:

Chatting to each other on social media. No, that worries me, to be honest, because then you're wondering if the platform is full of these AI bots, which are they, what's gonna be clicking on your ads? So what does it mean? Nothing. No,

Mari Smith:

I know that I get the bit of giving. Amplifying the reach of AI produced content.'cause it's still real human eyeballs that are looking at it. You get plenty of ad inventory you can shove in there. But yeah, AI. Comments and AI profiles and interacting with each other and interacting with us. I don't get that. The only thing I can possibly guess is it's somehow to just boost the numbers. You can say, we now have 5 billion users. Oops, he's 3 billion. Our bots.

Louise McDonell:

Yeah, they'll have more billion users than there are in the planet. Exactly.

Mari Smith:

Yeah. I think Zuckerberg even actually said that. He said at some point there'll be more AI agents, not necessarily Facebook profiles, but AI agents than there are people in the planet.

Louise McDonell:

And so what's his agenda do you think? Is it just the power that he wants to be the best and he doesn't really care what people think or how much money he makes?

Mari Smith:

It's all about money and power. I have recently read Careless People. It's a brilliant book. Kudos to Sarah N. Williams. She did a great job of that book. And here's me, miss Facebook Queen for 18 years. And I've always had my, suspicions about what goes on behind the scenes. She left in 2017, so a little while ago now I believe that Zuckerberg is still very committed to the Metaverse, and I watch what they're doing with the avatars and getting us more and more used to seeing the avatar versions of ourselves. And I don't know if you've played with the latest avatar creator, the controls are unbelievable. You get down to size of your lips or shape of your eyebrows, it's like you can just tweak it till you got this perfect version of your avatar. But I don't know, the hair looks still a bit plastic to me, but yeah, the whole metaverse thing, I don't know. We're supposed to all be walking around with goggles on and not interacting with real people. I dunno. We'll see. But yeah, the metaverse and then because, AI is so competitive is this massive arms race with all these big companies, it's quite feasible that meta will get. Big time into artificial general intelligence and creating robots and competing with Musks and who knows? We'll see.

Louise McDonell:

Yeah, exactly. Fasten your seat belts. I know. Okay, so let's finish off on a positive for anyone tuning in. Okay, the positive is still, Facebook's still very relevant. Facebook, Instagram, same platform for ads. What would you add to that, Mari?

Mari Smith:

I would add also. I'm glad it just popped in my mind. One of the things that I really think is awesome about the AI powered algorithms is predicting intent. And this is one of the things Gary Vayner talks about too. We've moved away from the follower graph, the friend graph. We're now at the interest graph. That's the non followers, that's the suggested for you, recommended content. And if the. AI can predict intent or a behavior. It's okay, like you just said with the ads, somebody's responding well to this. Okay, let's show it to more people like that. And it knows more about us than we know about ourselves. It being, the meta algorithms, data points, I'm really excited to see the buyer intent aspect, which they absolutely have done. Really well with the ads they can totally apply that to organic. And so now this whole non follower and predicting the user intent, buyer intent, the behavior, and just overall having it be a much better experience for people. So really when you go on that site and you really have Oh wow. This algorithm knows me so well. This is the exact content I want to see. And I hope that we get to that point sooner or later.

Louise McDonell:

So do I. Yeah, because I still really Facebook and you know what I really like about it? It works for business and it makes them money. And I suppose that's an important message for anyone tuning in here to take away, is that it's still making you money. So don't ignore it because everyone focuses in. So many people just talk about Instagram continually, but we always get more sales from Facebook for airlines over Instagram. It's just always the way. Mari thank you so much for your time. It's so wonderful to have you here. You're such an expert, you're such a leader, and you're such an inspiration.

Mari Smith:

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.

Louise McDonell:

Not at all. My pleasure. I just stopped the recording.