Back to the Future: the new Facebook algorithm
I returned to work at the beginning of the year to an onslaught of questions. Mostly brands freaking out after Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcement during the second week of January. The news had broken that Facebook will be updating its algorithm again. This time, with disastrous effects on Pages.
The biggest reasoning for the algorithm update? Zuckerberg wants Facebook to help connect people with each other. Again. That was why he built the social networking platform in the first place.
After reading through Zuckerberg’s post and their Head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri’s blog post, I quickly realized that many of my clients hadn’t read the full announcement properly. What they failed to understand was that while this big change would eventually be rolled out across all Facebook products, it only really applied to the organic content. Facebook is no longer a content distribution platform. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
The rent is due
It’s been reported that Facebook is one of the world’s the biggest content publishers. Which is extremely rare for a company that doesn’t create its own content. That’s because you and I and every other marketer are creating content for Facebook. Sadly, all the content we’re posting doesn’t make Facebook an owned platform, the way a website would. You don’t even own the audience either. Far from it actually. Think of Facebook as a house. You’ve been living it in for years, you’ve furnished it, you’ve decorated it. Hell, you love it. But you don’t own it. You’re only renting space. And the landlord has just increased the rent.
Usually when that happens, tenants either find a new space to live in or they cough up and pay the bills. For those who choose to move, I’m sure you know exactly where to go. You’ve researched your audience and you know they’re either on SnapChat or Twitter. Or you simply see better ROI through email marketing (plus you actually own your audience data). But for those of us who are choosing to stay, it isn’t all that bad. The future isn’t that grim.
For years experts and “gurus” have been saying Facebook is a pay-to-play platform. Facebook has just made it that much more obvious now. As I mentioned briefly earlier, not all Page posts will disappear from the News Feed. Only the organic ones. If you have a Paid strategy, you’ll be ok. Well, kinda.
Facebook is running out of ad inventory, and with more brands and marketers and advertisers likely to feed more dollars into their Pages, Facebook ads are likely to get more expensive. Sooner, rather than later. There will be more competition with less inventory. The exciting challenge now is to get really good at Facebook.
New phone, who dis?
I’m not going to break down exactly what the changes are and what the mean, because it’s been covered by all the major news outlets. You can read that here, here and here. Oh, and here. For those Pages who are choosing to keep investing in Facebook, I was listening to a really interesting podcast in the week by Michael Stelzner from the Social Media Examiner. He went through all the proposed changes to the algorithm and offers practical solutions for marketers.
1. Posting frequency. If you’re dedicating resources to more than one organic post per day, you’re wasting your time. Rather put those resources into perfecting your paid strategy.
2. Engagement signals. Only create organic content that will get your audience to interact with each other, not just you. This engagement needs to be more than an emoji or a “great” or “thanks”. Your followers need to be having real conversations with each other. And, yes, Facebook knows how to identify real conversations.
3. Live video. Video is dead. Long live live video. Facebook will no longer be prioritizing pre-recorded videos in the News Feed. They say it promotes too much “passive watching”. What they want instead is people interacting and commenting on videos. According to their research, this only really happens on live video. Time to up your live video game.
4. See-First: Remember this? It’s the only option your followers can “opt-in” to still see your content in their News Feed. By selecting this option, your organic posts will appear in your follower’s feed as soon as you post it. Prompt your followers to use this option.
5. Avoid engagement bait: The algorithm is smart. Really smart. Just like we all know what “click bait” is, it knows what engagement bait is. If you don’t know, then very simply, you can no longer blatantly ask your followers to Comment on your posts. Yes, that’s what you want them to do, but you need to find more creative ways of asking your followers to comment on your content without saying it in those exact words. Frustrating, I know.
6. Facebook ads: It’s time to get good at this, folks.
7. Messenger chatbots: They’ve been around for a while but I don’t think content producers are using the tech to its fullest capacity. Messenger has been touted as the new content distribution channel whereby you can serve content to an engaged user in a private setting. You don’t have to fight for attention amongst all the promotions and discounts here; just learn more about who you’re engaging with and then serve up content that’s best suited to that particular user’s needs.
In the coming weeks and months, you’ll want to inspire your audience to actively engage with your content.
No one knows exactly what the impact of these new changes will be. But you’ve got to get your audience connecting and chatting with each other. Facebook is changing. Are you willing to change with it?
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