HSH 087: The New Facebook Algorithm

Is the new Facebook algorithm getting your down? On today’s episode we’re talking all about what it will to your business and how you can overcome these changes!  

First of all, remember that we can’t control the changes that Facebook makes, but we can control how we react to them.  

Here are some recent changes, taken straight from Facebook’s policies:  

“Page posts will still appear in the newsfeed, though there may be fewer of them”  

Facebook isn’t saying that business pages are gone, but they are telling us that people engage more naturally with family, friends and people they know, and not necessarily brands. They’re just putting more priority on engagement here!  

“The impact will vary from page-to-page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and show people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decrease in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”  

If you’re putting your content out but not garnering engagement, it’s not going to get pushed as far. It’s always been that more engaging posts get more reach, and it’s really up to us to be super-engaging with our content and to spark conversations (with certain restrictions that I talk about).  

“Page posts that generate conversation between people will show higher in the newsfeed. For example, live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook.”  

I encourage you to test things like live video versus non-live video, and how a post fares when you share it from Instagram instead of posting it right on Facebook.  

Here are three ways that you can overcome these changes:  

1. Look at how you’re starting conversations  

It’s the little changes in wording that we can start to make right now that can make the biggest impact. It’s the difference between shouting at your audience and starting a real conversation with them!  

2. Start leveraging live video  

If we know that live video gets engagement, and Facebook is telling us in our own words that this type of content will get pushed, then why wouldn’t we be doing more of it? You don’t have to be an expert at it, just get started.  You could do this many ways: with live Q&A sessions, giving predictions and sharing your expertise on a certain topic.  

3. Run advertisements  

You don’t have to be spending a huge amount on ads, but you should be running them. You can take engaging posts and boost them to your audience. You can then leverage these ads to drive people off of Facebook and build you warm audiences, so that you’ll always have people to market to.  

Remember that you can always create content that is engaging and then plug your promotion in at the end of it. You should always be promoting to your warmest audience, because that’s where you’re going to get the most results.  

Even though the Internet is a constantly changing place, we don’t have to panic and we don’t need to freak out. We do need to be informed though and continue to make smart business decisions going forward about how we’re going to leverage Facebook’s new algorithm.  

LINKS:  

HSH 086: INSTAGRAM FOR THE REST OF US WITH JASMINE STAR