How to adjust your Facebook strategy to handle the drastic Newsfeed change

Facebook’s recent changes to its Newsfeed algorithm should not be news to most marketing professionals. This update was so drastic that news media said it cost Mark Zuckerberg $3.3 billion in his personal shares of Facebook after the company’s stocks fell following the announcement.

In short, this update said the new Newsfeed will give less priority to business and media pages, and put more focus on personal profiles and posts that encourage “meaningful interactions.”

What this means for business pages like yours is fewer organic impressions, which is something we have anticipated since mid-2017. This could be a potential setback, but with the right strategy adjustment, it’s still possible to gain the results you desire and establish a successful Facebook presence.

The key to achieving this comes with three strategy changes:

Quality over Quantity

As an agency that manages social media, we used to adopt the strategy of “the more, the merrier” — we post frequently, anywhere from 12 to 16 posts per month. As it was still possible back then for business pages to generate organic reach, large quantity can help generate enough reach and attention to keep the page vibrant.

But with this recent change, Facebook made it clear that this strategy will no longer work: “pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution.”

This means under the new algorithm, producing a lot of content that doesn’t generate good engagement will no longer help draw more traffic or attention. Even worse, Facebook may potentially penalize pages that do this for “generating noise.”

This is why instead of quantity, it’s far more important now to focus on quality — try to spend more time and thoughts on developing posts that will potentially create more engagement. And check your Insights tab to examine how the content performs, and replicate high-performing content for successes.

We are also expecting Facebook to rank videos higher than other traditional formats. So try to venture out of photos or links and use more formats like videos, livestream videos, collection (canvas) and carousels to leverage more engagement.

More Targeted Ad Spending

Coinciding with the “death of organic reach” trend, we started noticing decrease in result per cost since mid-2017. As Facebook grows in Myanmar, more and more businesses are advertising on Facebook. This creates more competition in ads bidding, hence leading to higher cost per the same results.

In order to tackle this, Revo has proactively created a new team called “Media Insights.” This new team will be closely monitoring the day-to-day ad spending to make sure every dollar is efficiently spent.

If you are running your own page, it’s also important to experiment with your target audience, trial run campaign spending or use creative measures to make sure that the money you spend is effective and will generate returns.

Using Social Influencers Strategically

If you are still seeking more reach and traffic, a good way to go around the algorithm change is to adopt social influencer campaigns. Social influencer profiles are considered personal accounts, not business, so they won’t take as big of a hit from as business pages do.

Using social Influencers is a big topic on its own, which we will elaborate in a future post. But one thing worth mentioning is that choosing which social influencers to work with, what kind of content to post and getting reliable end results are all strategic decisions that demand careful thinking. If you are seeking advice in this area, please contact us at hello@revotech.co.

To all the digital marketers out there, best of luck in continuing using Facebook to your advantage and receiving tangible results!