4 Tips to Survive Facebook’s Changes to the News Feed

Just last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to Facebook’s algorithm regarding news feeds. According to Zuckerberg, he wants to bring Facebook back to its roots; i.e., more focused on a social interaction, fostering more connections with friends and family. He wants to encourage users to have more conversations and connections with peers, rather than being bombarded by brands. In fact, Zuckerberg stated, “…public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

What this Change Means to Businesses

These changes will have a definite impact on brands depending on Facebook advertising to continue to attract consumers and generate leads. It likely will end – or at least reduce the effectiveness of – the common tactic of throwing every article up on a brand’s Facebook wall to see what sticks.

Since space in the Facebook news feed is limited, the increased focus on posts from friends and family will result in a decrease in content from businesses.

Facebook’s head of news Adam Mosseri defined the impact, saying, “As we make these updates, pages may see their reach, video watch time, and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from page to page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”

Let’s read that again…”Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution.”

So, with Facebook ads taking a back seat in this new algorithm, can businesses still use Facebook as a viable marketing tool for organic SEO? The short answer is yes, but the strategy needs to change to remain effective. Some suggestions for staying afloat in the Facebook ads pool are as follows.

1.     Facebook Content Must Be More Engaging.

Hopefully, you or your social media marketing team already concentrate on the quality and value of your content, both on social media and elsewhere. Consumers are growing increasingly more demanding in this area, so you need to deliver interesting and relevant information in order to attract and retain your audience.

The change to the FB news feed is intended to make its users’ lives better by improving the quality of the content while reducing quantity. The content will need to produce conversation without using gimmicks to inflate clicks and comments. You will need to be hyper-vigilant in ensuring your ads and posts are meaningful, helpful, relevant and useful, not just a lot of hyperbole, or “engagement baiting”.

2.     Consider Alternative Ad Placements

Because the availability of posts allotted to businesses will drastically decrease with this shift in the news feed, competition and costs will radically increase. Alternatively, you could take advantage of other ad placement opportunities available, such as:

• Groups
• Right column
• Instant articles
• In-stream video
• Instagram (feed and story)
• Sponsored messages
• Audience network

3.     Closely Monitor Your Ads

You’ll need to do research and collect data to see where your FB business page followers have clicked and commented on; what gets conversations started.  Tracking and managing your allocated budget to advertising will be more important with this change as well.

Using Facebook Ads Manager allows you to manage and adjust your ad campaigns so that they are most effective. It’s increasingly more important to use this feature if you want to continue maintaining a successful ad campaign.

4.     Take A Page From YouTube Vlogers

Facebook still loves the idea of people posting natural and live videos to their platform. If your text posts are getting little engagement or no shares, consider making that content into short videos. Social browsers are much more likely to watch a video on a subject than read about it.

Not only does this take advantage of the Facebook platform, it allows potential customers to get to know, like, and trust you more easily. Short informational videos on a hot topic or Q&A session in your speciality can go a long way to keeping your business page relevant. Just make sure to a some point during the video to ask for Likes and Shares from the audience. Also, don’t forget to Like and Share from your own personal accounts. This will send the positive signals that Facebook is now looking for with regards to business pages.

Kalamazoo SEO for Growth Can Help

We can help you create and manage your Facebook Ads campaign through this shift in their News Feed algorithm to make sure you remain competitive and viable. Contact us today to learn how we can improve your online presence!