Why You Should Change Your Facebook Marketing Strategy

Digital Media Branding Podcast Episode 22 In today’s episode we will talk about how Facebook’s newsfeed changes should impact your Facebook marketing strategy. We will cover Story Bumping, Last Actor and Auto Video Previews on Mobile Facebook Pages...and how these three changes affect your current marketing strategy. Hello and welcome to the digital media branding podcast. I’m your host Carlos Quintero. I own a full service digital media branding and marketing agency called MediaOnQ based out of Fargo, North Dakota. We provide Social Media Marketing services for many of our clients and Facebook is as it should be an important part of any social media marketing strategy. About 4 ½ to 5 months ago, Facebook once again updated the algorithm that determines what people see in their news feed. This change has affected many company pages. The number of people who see each of your company page post is referred to as REACH. And REACH from company pages has gone down – way down in many cases. Many of our clients have reported 30% or more in decreases. So let’s dive in and try to identify why this is happening and attempt to come up with a way to improve our REACH. Everyone knows and everyone seems to accept the fact that all of your followers will most likely not see all of your posts. At best we reach 16% of our followers with our posts. We talk about this subject at length in episode 5, How To Use Facebook For Business. I’ll link to in the show notes in case you’re interested in checking that out.  So again, we’re not surprised in that we will not reach 100% of our Facebook followers. We estimate that the average Facebook user has roughly 1,500, give or take a hundred, possible posts they could see at any given time. These posts would include any that their friends or company pages have interacted with by liking or posting and sharing. The Facebook algorithm then has to sort through all those posts and decide which to show and in what order to show them. This is where EdgeRank comes in to play. EdgeRank is what Facebook used to call their algorithm. When an update is first posted, it basically has the same amount of weight as any other new post on Facebook. The only way to ensure that your business posts has more weight or have an advantage that would allow it to be shown to more people is for you to promote it …in other words, buy advertising from Facebook. As Facebook continues to evolve, the algorithm becomes more and more sophisticated. Facebook now tells us that there are hundreds of factors that affect how their algorithm performs. This is what complicates things for all of us Business Owners and Marketers. The original notion that Facebook was a great way to get FREE Digital Advertising on the Web for our business has quickly gone away. In August of 2013 Facebook once again announced two new changes or modifications to their algorithm. The new changes are Story Bumping and Last Actor.  These two new changes are the main cause for the decreases we talked about earlier. Let’s go over these changes. Story Bumping Story Bumping allows Facebook to determine what is new to a user.  This means that if you don’t log in to Facebook for a day or two, it is possible that your news feed will not feature today’s content but rather content that has been posted since the last time that you logged in which can be several days old.  So when you log in to your Facebook account and see stories that are old, outdated or untimely know you know that it is probably because you haven’t logged in regularly…  Who would this impact the most? The answer is Just About Everyone. Say you are running a promotion so some kind. You create a post with the specifics – if people have not engaged with you recently or have logged in regularly they will not know about your promotion because it will not be shown to them. If you however have a very active following for your business page where people are Liking, Sharing and Commenting on your content regularly then you’ll benefit because the life of that post is extended due to engagement. This basically means that out of that 16% potential REACH that we stated with, you are now competing with every friend and like that your followers interact with for REACH, because the posts with the most engagement will automatically be bumped up in the news feeds. As a business owner or marketer is has never been more important to figure out how to increase the engagement of our posts to ensure that people want to interact with us by Liking the post, Commenting in the post and hopefully even Sharing the post. My advice to you would be to be methodical. Post content with a purpose and measure your results.  Always try to bring value to your audience and your company through your Facebook posts. And always ask yourself, is this post engaging? And if it isn’t then make the necessary changes before you post it. This now brings up the Last Actor change.  Last Actor refers to the fact that Facebook is now keeping track of the last 50 user interactions for each person. Based on these last or most recent 50 interactions, Facebook will then rank the pages where the interaction happened higher. So if say I interacted with 2 business pages and 48 friend pages as part of my Last Actor activity, the next time any of those Business Pages or Friends post, Facebook will rank their content higher in my news feed increasing the likelihood that I will see their content again. If you remember I started by saying that any one person has 1,500 potential posts that they can view at any one time.,  And we will at best reach 16% of our total followers. Last Actor now makes it so that if you don’t post every day, you’re probably never going to be in a person’s last 50 interactions. Posting once per day is probably not good enough. You’ll want to post regularly throughout the day to increase your chance of being bumped up in the news feed and ending up on more of your follower’s last 50 interactions. We work with Pages for our clients on a regular basis here at MediaOnQ and I’ve noticed that when we have a popular post it immediately will impact the next subsequent post by boosting it up the news feed.  This is now part of our Facebook marketing strategy  When we have a popular post, we will then post additional content within 90 minutes of the popular post because the added post’s REACH goes through the roof. This is once again where you want to be methodical. Plan out your posts where you set the bait with the first post and go for the ADDED REACH with the subsequent post. The initial post’s lifespan is like that of a firecracker…It is not intended to have lasting impact but rather to get as much attention as possible. This is what allows the supporting post to linger longer high on the news feed. One other change that I want to quickly cover is how Facebook now auto previews videos in the news feed on mobile devices. The videos will not play or have sound unless you actually engage with them by taping or clicking on them. I think this gives all of us an opportunity to embrace the use of video for our business and opens up additional creativity options for our business videos. We’ll be exploring options around using Video on Facebook this quarter and I’ll make sure to share the results with you. And if you need help or tips on how to use video in your marketing visit MediaOnQ.com and check out our Digital Media Blog, where we have a collection of videos that can help you fast track your production.  You can also find them on our YouTube channel.  I’ll include the link in the show notes, which will be posted at MediaOnQ.com. Our most recent episode is right on the home page so it will be easy for you to find. Do you use Facebook as part of your marketing plan? If you do, have you seen a drop in REACH from your company page on Facebook?  If you’d like to share your comments or tips with us, please email me at studio@mediaonq.com or leave your comments in our blog post at MediaOnQ.com. I hope that you found this information useful. Please subscribe on iTunes, Leave us a Review and share this with a business owner or marketing professional so that we can help each other through information sharing. Join me next time where we’ll discuss the anatomy of a successful business page on Facebook. Until next time, I’m Carlos Quintero from MediaOnQ. MediaOnQ – Helping You Compete In Today’s Web Economy. Thank you for listening.