Learn the origins of Facebook friend recommendations and the reasons behind their appearance in your account
Facebook, the most popular social network in the world, aims to bring people together because, in contrast to other social media sites, content shared by friends we have added has a wider audience when it appears on our Facebook feed.
In light of this, it is common to occasionally see friendship suggestions in our profiles. These are suggestions made by the social network itself, inviting us to widen our network of contacts.
Although Facebook's algorithm is always trying to find matches so that these suggestions make some sense, it is very common to find people who are completely unknown and have nothing to do with our profile.
On this occasion, we will analyze this system that Facebook has implemented for many years, and which to this day greatly confuses users who use the social network.
- Where do friend suggestions come from on Facebook?
Facebook has an algorithm that is constantly analyzing profiles. For example, if you added a work friend a few days ago, the algorithm will try to find matches with your profile and the friends that person added.
If you find a match, whether it's a friendship, a workplace, or mutual connections, a secret interaction process will begin. What does this mean? It will constantly show you a notification to add this person as a friend.
To be more clear about this, the information Facebook uses to show friend suggestions is based on four pillars:
- The contacts the user has.
- People who are related to our friends that we can recognize.
- Activity related to sharing posts, groups, or tags.
- Same profile information: city, school, work.
mutual friends
These aspects form the algorithm that Facebook uses to display popular friend suggestions. Of course, there are times when these suggestions fail on a large scale, so the social network does not always do its job correctly (suggesting unknown people who have no relation to our profile).
- Why do friend suggestions appear on Facebook?
As we explained above in the article, these suggestions appear thanks to the algorithm that Facebook has. When it finds a match with our profile and that of other users, the suggestion is displayed in our account, which aims to allow us to expand our network of friends and connections with people we can get to know.
Likewise, if someone we don't know searches for us on Facebook and finds our profile, the social network will update its algorithm and show us a friend suggestion to add them as a friend. Even if we do the same or touch someone on Facebook, the social network will also show our account in a friend suggestion format.
It is worth noting that friend suggestions can be deactivated from our profile settings. We recommend not doing this, because this way you can not only find people you might know, but you can also use this function to see who is "stalking" you.