The Startup’s guide to making the most of ‘Time Well Spent’ on Facebook
Zucky has sworn by his words. Facebook has announced new tools to manage your time on Facebook and Instagram. As a consumer, it could mean a more intentional use of these platforms.
However, for startups like you, it equates to a further decline in organic reach of your brand.
As the tech world continues to debate on ‘Time Well Spent,’ it’s time that small business owners like you understood its implications.
Today, let’s pull the curtains on ‘Time Well Spent’ and how it affects the news feed. Then, I’ll share five strategies that startups can implement to make the most of these changes.
Decoding ‘Time Well Spent’
In 2013, design ethicist Tristan Harris started the non-profit, ‘Time Well Spent.’ The goal of the initiative was to shape technology such that we live well and intentionally.
He emphasized how social media platforms seduce us to spend more time on their platforms mindlessly.
After it got a lot of attention, in January 2018, Zuckerberg acknowledged the movement. He announced that his focus for the year was making the time we all spend on Facebook as time well spent.
Now, let’s get to the hurtful part, shall we?
Well, Mr. Zuckerberg revealed that posts from businesses are hindering people’s experiences on Facebook.
“But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”
He went on to say how his product team will now focus on meaningful interactions. In essence, business, brands, and media pages will need to make way.
“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”
What does it mean for startups?
If your brand’s page is inclined towards providing a passive experience to your fans, then Facebook is going to punish you.
Don’t worry, though.
Here are five ways to pass the new ‘time well spent’ algorithm in the news feed with flying colors.
5 simple marketing strategies to gain visibility in the changing Facebook News Feed
Facebook has two billion users. If you find your way on the platform, then there’s still an enormous amount of value for startups like you. Here are a few ways you can fit in with the latest changes in the Facebook algorithm.
1. Forego engagement bait tactics
Are you one of those businesses that baited its fans to comment and react to updates?
Something along the lines of “Like this if you’re a Snoopy Dog lover.”
Else, did you bait your followers to tag their friends as a favor and comment a “Yes” on your updates?
Well, bad habits die hard.
Facebook has pulled the plug on such tactics.
If you continue to use them, then your page will keep getting demoted from the News Feed.
Now:
You need to encourage meaningful conversations by sharing relevant stories to your users. So brainstorm and come up with ideas to spark authentic engagement.
A great example is the weekly dinner table conversations by Wait But Why. They call forth their community to openly discuss subjects that might interest them - like ‘universal basic income.’
Although they used a link post update to invite their fans on their website, even their Facebook posts saw in-depth comments (as visible below).
2. Request your super fans to “see first.” And invite them to your Facebook group.
All your followers aren’t equal. On the one hand, you have regular fans that occasionally see and like your content.
Then, you have got “super” fans. They will enthusiastically follow and engage with each update you post. You can think of them similar to Kevin’s idea of a“true fan” that will buy everything you create.
On Facebook, you can request your superfans to mark your Page as a ‘favorite.’ It ensures that they get notified when you post on your page and engage with your updates.
To ensure your super fans never miss an update, you can show them how to mark “see first.” Here’s a video by Social Media Examiner that shows the feature in action.
Next, a great way to channelize the enthusiasm of your superfans is by connecting them in a tightly-knit community.
Facebook even offers you the option to link a group to your page. Indeed, Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned that News Feed would see more updates from groups.
“The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.”
Hence, it makes sense to launch a group and request your “super fans” to join it. In the group, you can start regular conversations about your audience interests that are closely related to your brand offerings.
Remember your goal with building such a community is to encourage human connection (as Gary Vee would say).
In 2017, Neeraj Joshi started Pushstart as a simple Facebook group. Within months, it became one of India’s most active startup communities. When I asked him for engagement numbers, he shared that 86% of the group members are monthly active.
Getting the initial contributors for building your group is challenging. However, if you keep actively interacting with your members, asking for feedback, and listening to them, you’ll hit the sweet spot.
Here’s Pushstart founder Neeraj Joshi with his number one tip for building a thriving community.
“Provide enough value, so that word of mouth kicks in. Make it easy for people to share about your community with their friends and incentivize them accordingly.”
Indeed, as a startup, you should do things that don’t scale. It isn’t an entirely bad idea to create a Facebook profile for your brand and use it to get feedback.
Music social network app, Mudzic, followed the strategy. They created an authentic profile and used it to get initial feedback from their target audience. Their founder Ananyaa Goel shares a detailed account of the strategy below.
“We created a Facebook account to have one-on-one feedback sessions with our audience. We also used it to post regular updates about the app and share its progress (even in other Facebook groups).
Not only did we receive great feedback and product improvement ideas, but we also found more users for Mudzic. Indeed, three of the loyal users we acquired from the exercise continue to use our app.”
You also need to remain careful with the strategy as Facebook could ban your profile if multiple people access it simultaneously. That’s happened with Mudzic as well.
3. Go Live
I know, I know.
It’s so scary to get in front of the camera; forget going live.
What if I tell you that live videos are watched three times that of regular videos?
When you’re live, it creates a sense of urgency in the audience. Also, the video remains available on your Facebook page as a regular post.
Indeed, you can go live on your Facebook group (if you follow the previous strategy). Your community will anticipate live sessions if you conduct value-adding Ask Me Anything. And you can expect high levels of engagement.
Here’s an example one-hour educational AMA session that Pushstart conducted with an industry influencer.
You can also conduct live polls and solicit participation in live contests. Else, you can choose to entertain your audience and create excitement by doing something as absurd as bursting a Watermelon (like BuzzFeed).
Yes, you can get creative — but keep your target audience in mind, and establish ‘why’ you’re going live before you do it. A weekly live video can start relevant dialogues and create authentic engagement for your brand.
4. Repurpose your text content into video and graphical formats
Unless you have been living under a rock, you might already know that getting people off Facebook is now more difficult than ever.
If you post a link to your website, then it only reaches a measly number of followers. One way to ensure visibility of your content is advertising. And we’ll talk about it in the next strategy.
However, you also need to change the way you look at Facebook.
Instead of hoping to drive thousands of direct visitors to your website for every Facebook post, you need to think of it as an awareness platform.
You’re investing in the long-term growth of your brand by putting out your content on Facebook. If possible, try to achieve your business goals directly on Facebook itself.
As a startup, you’re most likely creating textual long-form content for your blog. Now, you need to think of ways to repurpose the same content for native consumption on Facebook.
Sure, you can put up excerpts from your articles as text updates. However, videos and images tend to perform better on Facebook.
First, let’s look at how to convert your articles into videos. Lumen5 is an artificial intelligence-driven platform for creating engaging videos.
Gary-Yau-Chan experimented with converting a long-form article into a Facebook native video. Here are the results he reported:
“Results show that the B2B listicle video (which took 30min to repurpose) had reached 1370 people, with 530 views, was shared 10 times, had 8 comments, and had 20 likes. I got 20% retention on it, so ~100 people watch it through to the end. Definitely worthwhile.”
Next, let’s look at repurposing your content into pictures. Photos tend to get the highest engagement on the platform.
However, you still want to post a link to your website, right?
You can do so by uploading a picture (containing a takeaway from your article) natively on Facebook. Then, add a link to your content piece in the description of your update. Here’s an example of Brain Pickings doing it on their Facebook page.
As you reach a user a few times on Facebook, they are reminded of your brand. Eventually, they will visit your website to look at your content and possibly buy your products.
5. Learn effective Facebook advertising
And on to the last piece of unpopular advice — accepting that Facebook and all social media is now a pay to play model.
Those glory days of reaching hundreds of thousands of your fans for free are long past us. As more businesses jump on the advertising bandwagon, it’s going to get more expensive.
Now, you can either abandon the social media ship altogether. However, that’s not a smart move owing to the huge consumer attention present on these platforms.
A smart strategy is experimenting with cheap social media ads. You need only as little as $5/day. Facebook ads consist of these three elements: your creative, supporting copy, and your target audience.
You can start by selecting a general audience that has shown an interest in your brand. For instance, B2B content creation agency, Codeless, chose the following broad audience to kick off its advertising campaign.
However, refining and pruning your audience is essential. In their experiment, Codeless, saw a CPC of $0.17 for their nurtured custom audience. Compare that with a CPC of $.57 for a general audience.
To add another level of complexity, you can also experiment with the media assets in your campaign. Here are the example results for a custom vs. featured vs. video post that Codeless saw.
To learn more and get started with Facebook advertising, you can read the Buffer’s guide here.
Final Thoughts
As Facebook offers more control to its users and tightens its noose on brands, you need to keep evolving your strategy. The five strategies in this article must have sparked a few ideas to modify your Facebook marketing.
However, taking action and testing are the keys to refine your understanding of your audience. Now, go out in the wild and experiment to find what works for you!
Are there any other strategies that you recommend to startups for making the most of ‘Time Well Spent?’ Let me know in the comments.
Chintan Zalani is a writer passionate about startups, content strategy, and digital marketing. You can hire him at EliteCopywriter.com to create an effective content marketing strategy for your brand.
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