With the ever-changing algorithms across social media platforms, especially Facebook, the constant updates to how your content is viewed and interacted with have caused marketing to require true full-time strategizing. No longer can you post here and there and hope your business gets noticed because you posted a coupon for 10% off. After all; what good is a coupon if nobody is seeing it?
Algorithms
Over the last couple of years, Facebook has changed its algorithms immensely – to the point that businesses were left scrambling, trying to figure out the best way to market to their audiences. Business page interaction dropped drastically because the focus was no longer just relevant content, but how much meaningful interaction it could create among users’ friends and family.
In January of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced, “The first changes you’ll see will be in the News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. 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.”
This change caused Facebook interactions on business pages to decrease drastically. Bring us to 2020, and it’s changed again, but on the rise now. A new study from NewsWhip announced that engagement came back up throughout 2019 – but only specific types of content.
Source: Buffer
The Content
Facebook users like over 4 million posts every minute. There are over 60 million active business pages on Facebook. How do you stand out and get your share of the engagement? And what type of content are studies showing to create more interaction on Facebook? According to the NewsWhip study, links to articles and content that are not a part of Facebook’s pages fared the greatest amount of social engagement.
In other words – the Facebook news feeds prefer to show outside links that have been shared by friends and family, as opposed to posts shared from business pages. This means, having content on your website, such as relevant blogs, becomes just as important of an aspect in social media marketing as it is in your web design and SEO. If the algorithms continue on this path of development, the connection between powerful and relevant website content and your social media marketing plan will only continue to strengthen.
Photos
In addition to non-native links producing the best interactions, photos remain a top performer. Photos accounted for nearly half of the top 10,000 Facebook posts in 2019. Native video is also a highly shared post type, while live video is a top performer for comments, likely because of the conversational aspect.
Above all, the content you provide on Facebook needs to be likable and shareable. Imagine likes and shares to be a ranking system, and you receive one point for a like, and two points for a share. Then imagine a person’s newsfeed is a rundown of the top-scoring posts. The more the post is liked and shared, the more it appears in news feeds. A bit of a catch-22 for some. Your post needs popularity to be shown, and it can’t get popularity without being shown. This can be a struggle.
But let’s be honest, it can get confusing – and it’s near impossible to keep up with the constantly changing trends and algorithm updates without it being your full-time job. Sometimes, your best bet is to simply consult with the professionals. If you’d like to explore the option of working with a whole team that specializes in inbound marketing while costing less than just one employee, start with a completely free marketing consultation and see where we can help!
