Cracking the Facebook Algorithm Code
This is one of two articles I wrote for our November 2015 White Paper, “Understanding Facebook: From the People to the Bigger Picture.” You can download our full White Paper for free here.
As Facebook evolves from a purely social platform to one driven by content consumption, many things about the way people use it has changed. More than anything else, the news feed has driven these changes. While Facebook strives to improve their user experience and create more monetization opportunities, they’ve made it harder for marketers to permeate the noise. Tricks that used to be standard practice — for example, to include a clear call to action in your posts — can now seriously hurt your organic reach, and your engagement.
Across our clients, however, we’ve seen that a focus on compelling content and a great fan experience can still produce gains on Facebook. While we don’t expect we’ll ever see the volume of reach and engagements we saw just a few years ago, these tactics are essential for earning value from your Facebook presence:
01. Remember that Facebook is still a social network. Users go to Facebook to interact with friends, get news, and to engage with content — not to buy products or to be advertised to. When crafting content for Facebook, you need to remember what the value is for the fan in engaging with you.
Why should they care? How are you making their experience better? Whether it’s informing them of something they care about or feel is important to know (increasing their social currency), or connecting with them on an emotional level about a shared experience (e.g. a concert) or something relevant and funny, you need to be able to answer these questions for each and every post you publish.
02. Think mobile- and engagement-first. Early engagement rate on your post has a big impact on its organic reach. Content that Facebook sees people interacting with is more likely to be served to more users in the news feed, so it’s critical to position your content to entice users to click, comment, like, or share it.
Nearly half of Facebook users only access the platform via mobile phones, while nearly 900 million people access Facebook on their phone daily. Making sure your content looks great on the mobile news feed is critical to capture users’ attention as they scroll through their feed.
03. Keep it short — and relevant. With few exceptions, this age-old best practice remains true. You have only seconds — if even — to capture attention and get that early engagement that’s so critical to the lifetime reach of your post.
When appropriate, leveraging trending topics will also boost your organic reach. If a topic is trending and you post something related to it, your existing fans are more likely to be served that post among others about that topic. Alternately, putting your brand’s spin on trending social media and cultural moments can delight your fans and earn you a higher share of voice within the conversation.
04. Make your content visually appealing. Use custom images on Link posts and optimize your content to look great on mobile devices.
05. Don’t use keywords that clearly indicate a call to action. Explicitly asking your audience to do something (without paid support) will hurt your organic reach. Don’t use language like “Check out…” or “Listen to…” or “Buy…” unless you are planning to support it with some budget.
A more effective approach is to get creative with how you entice your fans to click or engage. The best approach is to let the quality of the content speak for itself, though you can experiment with different language choices, or even the use of emojis, to indirectly ask your fans for support.
06. If you’re explicitly promoting something, you’ll have to pay for it. This is reality of marketing on Facebook, and you need to accept it. Facebook users don’t care about being advertised to, so you will need to pay for the privilege to do so.
07. Whenever possible, use a native video post. Facebook has been aggressively growing its video business for well over a year now. Video content gets significantly higher organic reach than any other post format on Facebook. See section III of our White Paper for more on video.
Lastly, don’t forget to think beyond the news feed. There are many other ways to engage your audience on Facebook that can be far more effective at creating meaningful community and connections with your fans. Facebook Groups and, lately, Events have been extremely useful tools for our team in building direct contact for our clients to their fans.
