4 tips to conquer Facebooks latest update

Facebook has done it again!

Facebook is working hard to keep businesses on their toes with a major overhaul planned for 2018. Their vision is to change your news feed in the coming months with a new algorithm that will prioritize posts from friends, family and groups first, leaving business content at the bottom of the barrel. Pay close attention, your organic reach may just drop off a cliff!

What does this mean to your business page? Mostly that your organic reach (which currently only reaches about 2 - 4% of your audience) is going down to zero.

However, hope is not lost, there are ways to reach your target audience, you will just have to be smarter about it.

Here are our four top tips to ensure your posts don’t get lost.
 

1.  Generate original, shareable content

When reviewing your content strategy, the emphasis will need to be on quality, not quantity!

Your content should encourage meaningful interactions without any engagement baiting. Facebook actively penalises posts that ask for engagement such as: “Tag a friend who would love this” or “comment to win”. It’s all about interacting naturally with your customers in 2018, so make sure you create high quality content people want to share as oppose to asking them to share it and the new algorithm will reward you.

Video is your new best friend. When considering quality content, remember that Facebook is leaning heavily towards video content. Facebook will promote video above all other content and if it’s posted regularly and drives engagement, you’ll be doing just what the algorithm wants.

2.  Implement a paid strategy

With these changes all businesses will now have to pay to play. Depending on your goals, there are two ways to reach your audience using a paid strategy; boosted posts & ad campaigns.

Boosted posts are typically used when your goal is achieving engagement such as likes, shares and comments. If it’s quality content, users will interact with it and this will increase your reach. It’s still relatively cheap at approximately $1 a day to boost a post.

Facebook adverts are a bit more advanced and you need an ad manager account to set them up. Ad manager allows you to choose from multiple types of adverts and define your post goals including Page Likes, clicks to your website, app installs, app engagement, website conversions and much more.

3.  Use the new tools

There is a shift for Facebook to prioritise group posts as they inspire ‘meaningful discussion’. This means there is massive value in creating a group for your brand. It is important to note that this is for existing customers that want to communicate and connect with you brand and not to entice new customers.

Similar to email marketing, you can get people to opt-in and receive updates from your company page. From there, you can use an automated system to send updates to subscribers and respond to inquiries, complaints or potential bookings.

Facebook’s messenger tool also presents a great opportunity to engage directly with your customers without cluttering their news feed. Check out ways you can leverage Messenger for your businesses. 

4.  Target other platforms

Facebook might be one of the giants of the Social Media galaxy but it’s in no way the only star.

Instagram has also gone from 600 million users last December, to 800 million today. For comparison, Twitter has added 12 million new users in the same time period, while Snapchat, which is younger and growing at a faster rate, has added 20 million.

Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn can also serve their purpose depending on your business, product and target market. Research each platform, identify the best channels that allow you to have meaningful interaction with your customers and define goals and expectations for what you want to achieve. Don’t forget the golden rule; quality over quantity. You don’t need to have a presence on every social network, identify what works for you and own it.

The big takeaway is that the social media landscape is constantly evolving and your businesses digital strategy needs to do the same. Don’t post for post sake, create meaningful content that resonates with your audience and be smart with your marketing budget to ensure you get the results.