Changes to the Facebook News Feed may require you to rethink your content.
Facebook announced a change to their news feed that should concern all social media marketers.
In order to build a better feed for individual users, the new news feed will put more weight on posts from users’ friends and family—moving it away from posts from business pages, celebrities, fan clubs, etc.
“Our success is built on getting people the stories that matter to them most,” Adam Mosseri, Vice President, Product Management, News Feed for Facebook wrote in his blog. “If you could look through thousands of stories every day and choose the 10 that were most important to you, which would they be? The answer should be your News Feed. It is subjective, personal, and unique — and defines the spirit of what we hope to achieve.
That sounds like a good thing for users—and for many, it will be, but it will likely further reduce your organic page reach, as Facebook itself pointed out while announcing the news:
“…we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts. We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends.”
No doubt, this will have the added—and intended—consequence of bringing in more ad revenue for the social media giant. Boosted posts and paid advertisements will still reach additional people. Besides that, however, expect to see your organic reach drop even further—most business pages have seen a 40 percent drop in organic reach already this year, according to some sources.
So what can be done?
The concepts that make a strong Facebook post haven’t changed. What you want to do is come up with content that your followers will share with their friends and family: good, engaging graphics, snappy comments, personalized posts and giveaways.
It will be more important to be consistent with timing of your posts—find out when your audience is most likely to be perusing social media channels and post your content then.
Post reminders on how to get your followers to see your post: under the ‘like’ button, they’ll have the option to ‘see first’ and to turn on all notifications. Clicking those options will stack the odds in your favor. All you have to do is create a regular post that reads something like: Thank you for liking our page. Not seeing our posts? Make sure to click ‘see first’ under the ‘like’ tab and, as always, thank you for your support!
What do you think of the change? Will it help or hurt your business? Let us know in the comments!