Adjust Your Facebook Page Strategy
Facebook is making significant changes to its news feed algorithm in an effort to prioritize “meaningful” person-to-person interactions among friends and family over posts from Facebook pages. These updates will result in fewer public posts from pages and fewer videos in the news feed.
Marketers can expect the organic reach of their Facebook pages to drop.
While Facebook still values page content as an important part of their platform’s ecosystem, the news feed will shift the focus from ranking content that’s directly consumed from pages (which will shrink in reach) to content that is shared and talked about among friends (which will grow).
Comments King
Comments are more valuable than Likes. Meaning content that inspires comments, specifically, long comments which actually take time and thought to type out will be a positive ranking signal for the algorithm which will lead to increased distribution of the content which sparked the lengthy response. ~ Facebook
Posts that spark and inspire conversations and meaningful interactions among people will be prioritized over public content in the news feed after this update.
Example:
- More content from friends and family
- Posts from friends and family that seek advice or recommendations
- News articles or videos that prompt people to discuss and interact
Less Video
There will be less video. Video is an important part of the ecosystem… But it’s more passive in nature. There’s less conversation on videos, particularly public videos. ~ Facebook
Expect to start seeing less video content in the news feed because it typically sparks less conversation, particularly public videos.
Recommendations
Personally, I’m not really sold on this algorithm (algo) change solving the mucky Facebook experience. Algos tend to get things wrong more often than not—just listen to all of the negative sentiment when a chronologically sorted feed turns into an algorithmically sorted one.
This is Facebook, so I also expect to see new bot and comment-for-hire schemes popping up as marketers game the algo.
Not to mention, this change will likely just reinforce the filter bubble that Facebook is renowned for as users engage with like minded, factually deficient, posts.
The whole focus on comment length will be gamed by marketers and will exclude the quality content that might not obtain the vanity metrics or bot comments that the gamed posts will.
Outside of these things (or because of them), your business page planning should be adjusted.
Things to keep in mind:
As the changes go into effect, businesses will want to take steps to encourage meaningful interactions on the platform. Publish quality content that will spark conversations among users, engage in Facebook groups, and invest time in “live” video.
