After about five years of drastic shifts in the Facebook algorithm impacting how Facebook Pages reach their audiences, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new host of changes that have some enormous ramifications for businesses earlier today. If you use the social media platform for your marketing, you need to keep reading...
These changes will see our personal newsfeeds lose the cluttered and high volume of posts from businesses to more of a focus on content from our family and friends. It has been decided as a way to make our Facebook newsfeeds more meaningful which is a great thing in the social media world, but makes leveraging this platform more difficult for businesses.
"We've gotten feedback from our community that public content - posts from businesses, brands and media - is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other," wrote Mr Zuckerberg.
"Since there's more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what's in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other," he wrote.
Facebook believes we are consuming content ‘passively’ and content, such as video, which has had great positive results for businesses using the platform, will no longer rank as highly.
So, if you want to stay ahead of the game, here are three things to start doing right now…
- Focus on real interaction and engagement by creating and encouraging conversation and audience interaction through commenting and two-way dialogue.
- Create sharable content so your audience will share this will their family and friends, allowing it to gain substantial reach.
- Ensure your content mix is varied. So many businesses made producing more video content their big target for 2018, so don’t rely solely on this. Continue blogging, continue creating imagery that feeds a purpose.
If your reach starts to decrease over the next few weeks, turn back to these three things and you should slowly, start to see things pick up. It is important to know that paid advertising won’t be affected, but generally speaking if you want your ads to perform your page needs to be performing well without the spend, too.
Happy Facebooking!