Facebook News Feed is changing (what’s happening and what to do)

Facebook has announced a major algorithm change and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Let’s face it, we all knew this was going to happen.

It’s been a few months since we started to hear about a major Facebook algorithm change coming, which would decrease brands and publishers posts from the News Feed, to instead show more people and friends publications.

So when they say: Facebook was built to bring people closer together and build relationships. They mean it! Don’t forget that.

What is the update about?

On Facebook words: “Over the next few months, we’ll be making updates to ranking so people have more opportunities to interact with the people they care about.”, yes, you read it right, it means between people, not brands and people, not news outlets and people, just between people.

In someway, make sense right?

What does this means for pages and public content?

Here’s the challenge:

“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.”

So that’s it, you need to start creating engaging content that generates conversations between people, not just comments to your brand post, but interactions between people.

Be careful to not engage bait, because your posts will get demoted.
(What is Facebook Engagement Bait)

What type of posts are gonna rank higher in the News Feed?

Well, people can still see more posts from pages they follow, but they need to choose See first in News Feed Preferences. Of course this won’t happen that much, is like turning on notifications for your favorite people in Instagram (who does that?!).

As we said before, if you want your posts to rank higher in the News Feed you need to create content that generates conversation between people.

For example, live videos generates six time more interactions as regular videos. In Groups people tend to interact more between people.

Is Facebook eliminating Page content from News Feed?

No. This is not the same that those test they performed where all Page content was moved to the Explorer Tab. Page posts will still appear in News Feed, but it won’t get high ranked unless people is talking about it and is getting a lot of interactions.

So what should you do now?

First, I will insist on this; You should stop creating crappy content, click or engagement-bait content and step up your game with incredible, engaging, meaningful and authentic content that will make people interact with it and with other people.

Second, don’t get overwhelmed and accept that social media is always going to change and is not personal.

Social Media Examiner has made a live video where they analyze every chunk of this new announcement.

We all need to learn from this

One big thing you can learn from this is that is such a risk to depend so much on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media to grow your business, because you just never know when they are going to change, so you need to be prepared for things like this.

Maybe this year brands and publications will need to push harder for creative, content teams create more engaging content. Maybe we’ll be seeing an increase on Twitter or Instagram activity. We just don’t know yet.

One thing for sure, don’t make rushed decisions. This is just starting and we need to talk about it, analyze it and create new strategies to approach it. So let’s do it!

What do you think about this major algorithm change and what’s your plan?

Source: Facebook Newsroom

Originally published at strategybeast.com on January 12, 2018.