It’s the End of Facebook as We Know it and We Feel Fine

What’s Happening?

On January 11, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook would be changing its approach to the News Feed. These algorithm changes will begin happening over the coming weeks.

Going forward, Facebook will prioritize content that sparks conversations and genuine interaction between family and friends. Public content shared by brands and publishers that does not foster such community interaction will be deemphasized, as will content that is passively consumed.

Zuckerberg conceded that this shift towards community building will likely mean users spend less time on the platform, causing current engagement metrics to decline, but stressed that Facebook’s priority is to “encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

A contact at Facebook confirmed that “paid social and paid media will not be affected by this update, as Facebook already has ad load limitations in place to ensure a positive user experience with sponsored ads, posts, & content,”.

Measures of engagement that will be affected are reactions and likes, as comments, shares, and messages begin to be valued as indicators of meaningful interaction.

What does it mean if you’re a big business?

If you already have a strong presence on Facebook, you’re in luck. You cultivated an audience on Facebook during a time when organic reach was generous and a little ad spend went a long way. Your audience is still there, they’re just becoming harder and harder to reach.

For now, the best way to combat this limited reach is by increasing your paid support. Facebook is a paid channel. Brands who rely solely on organic reach shouldn’t expect to see a high number of website referrals from their Facebook pages.

Even with paid support on Facebook posts, these changes to the Facebook News Feed will affect every metric. Successful brands will be the ones focusing on the right metrics. (For more on that, see “What does it mean for your Facebook Metrics?” below.)

On Facebook, avoid indulging in clickbait. Invest in video, particularly Facebook Live videos. Focus on quality over quantity — one excellent post with strong paid support will be more effective and a better use of time than three mediocre posts with little paid support.

This is also a good time to investigate and invest in other channels. Instagram is an effective tool for increasing brand awareness and sparking inspiration, but it hasn’t developed into a strong driver of referrals. Particularly within the travel industry, the effectiveness of Twitter is on the decline. But for many brands, Pinterest has become an important channel for content distribution. Facebook Groups, online message boards, and “dark social” (think Slack, group chats, and emails) will become more important in this new social landscape. People often share links on dark social by copy-and-pasting the URL, making correct tagging and tracking vital.

A good social media strategy is a living document that allows room for change, experimentation, and growth.

What does it mean if you’re new to Facebook or launching your business?

The changes described by Facebook shouldn’t scare you if you’ve recently launched your Facebook page or if you plan to this year. This is a progression of the environment that already exists on the platform — Facebook wants you to pay in order to grow your page.

Brands new to Facebook (even if you’ve been on the platform for one or two years) should use this as an opportunity to re-think their approach to the channel and what success is going to look like.

This does not mean abandoning the platform altogether. Facebook is one of the most widely-adopted digital platforms in the world, with more than 1.37 billion daily active users. Your customers expect to find you on Facebook. They expect you to respond to their questions, complaints, and reviews. They turn to Facebook for relevant information about your operating hours, your website, your phone number, and more. Your page needs to be updated and monitored regularly, but your approach will need to change.

In the short-term, that means investing media dollars into Facebook to make sure your content is seen by the right audience (Sorry, there’s no avoiding it). In the long-term, that means diversifying the ways you bring traffic back to your website, and having a central hub (a website, a newsletter) that make your business easy to find elsewhere. Make content that’s useful, that serves a purpose for your customer (a list of reasons to use your product is pretty self-serving, don’t you think?). Give your customer a reason to subscribe, to return to you, to purchase.

Using Facebook has never been the sum of a content strategy. These changes solidify this. There is no substitute for a defined customer segment, a product or service that solves this segment’s problems, and a sound differentiator that sets you apart from your competitors. The channels we use to communicate our message change all the time, this is simply another development.

What does it mean for your Facebook Metrics?

Ahhhhh numbers. They count. But the ones we’ll be watching in the future may differ from what we’ve viewed in the past.

First of all, yes, although we can’t predict the future, we do believe there’s a very strong chance brands and publishers will see their organic referrals from Facebook (the amount of traffic coming to your site from Facebook) decline, along with engagement with their organic posts.

Measuring Facebook’s or any other social media success has been challenging — it is very subjective and very hard to aggregate. While some posts are meant to drive traffic to your website, others are just meant to inspire or pique the interest of your audience. Facebook’s own measurement of engagement is very broad and vague — assigning equal value to a click to expand a photo and someone sharing your content.

But if we continue to think about Facebook as a paid advertising network and not an organic channel that brands can use to sprinkle their messages around, we can reframe what success looks like for our Facebook efforts.

Moving forward, we will see a gradual shift in our Facebook KPIs.

From Passive Engagement to Committed Engagement

• “Liking” or “Reacting” to a post is a low-barrier interaction and doesn’t, in today’s landscape, give us a good sense of how committed that user who liked our video is to our brand. Instead, we’ll want to focus on the specific type of engagement and drive more qualified interactions such as meaningful conversations in post comments and the sharing of our content.

From Organic Engagement and Referrals to Paid Referrals/Newsletter Sign-ups/Leads

• Using paid strategies and tactics, it’s important to drive specific, measurable interactions that bring potential customers closer to your storefront/destination/property. This can include having people sign up for your newsletter, submit their contact info in exchange for more information and driving people back to strategic areas of your own website. Establishing a paid plan to support these types of conversions will be key, as we’ll be monitoring what’s working and adjusting the approach accordingly.
• Being able to differentiate the traffic on your website between your paid and organic social efforts will be increasingly more important to optimize these tactics, making your URL tagging structure an important piece of your strategy.

Demographics

• We all have specific audiences we want to attract, based on the service, product, or location we’re promoting on Facebook. Taking a closer look at our demographics will become increasingly important in judging the success of our Facebook efforts. Are we engaging with our potential customers, in our target markets? Is the quality of our audience improving over time? These are the things we’ll want to be watching.

What does it mean for your content strategy?

Think back to five or so years ago. What did your social media strategy look like? What did a successful Facebook post look like? Back then, the key to social media success was often pairing a captivating photo with an engaging, well-written caption. Maybe it included a link, but chances are your best-performing posts didn’t. If the post was successful, it would get shared again and again.

Times have changed, and we must reframe our thinking. Facebook posts are no longer the content. Facebook — and all social channels — are the distribution.

These new changes to Facebook mean three things for your content and social strategies:

1. It’s more important than ever to focus on creating quality, owned content. Invest in blog writing, video, infographics, quizzes, etc.
2. Your social media strategy and your content strategy should work in harmony. Your social channels should be working to distribute your content to key audiences. Your content should be interesting enough that people will want to spend their valuable time on it.
3. Each of your social media channels should have a unique strategy and purpose. For example, user-generated content may thrive on Instagram while it withers on Pinterest.

Share your content on your Facebook page. But more importantly, create content that will inspire people to share it on their Facebook pages, with their parents via email, with their coworkers via Slack. That is what a successful content strategy, and social strategy, looks like.

Key Takeaways

1. A comprehensive paid strategy is more important than ever for success on Facebook.

2. The quality of your content is what is going to count; less “how many times I am posting to Facebook” and more “what is the value I am providing to my followers on my own site/blog/email newsletter that I can distribute in creative ways.

3. The metrics of success on Facebook are changing.

4. Facebook remains a piece of your content marketing mix, but not a whole strategy.

5. As always, you must test, try, evaluate and try again when it comes to your social and content strategy.

More information:

For more context on these changes and what it means for brands and publishers, we recommend the following articles.

News Feed FYI: Bring People Closer Together — via Facebook

Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family — via The New York Times

Here’s how Facebook is explaining its feed change to publishers via Digiday

Facebook’s Algorithm Is Apocalyptic for Brands, Publishers, Users, and Facebook Itself — via Contently

Facebook Finally Blinks — via The Atlantic

Facebook’s startling new ambition is to shrink — via The Verge

As we adjust our Facebook strategy, we’ll be closely monitoring the success of our tactics, so check back for a report on how our approach is working.