Does your website get traffic from social media sites?
Maybe you don’t even really use your website and instead focus on Facebook.
For many businesses that strategy has worked very well. If you share things that your followers want to see you can get good engagement on Facebook and other sites. And that can lead to turning those followers into customers and repeat customers.
But just the other day Facebook announced another change to its newsfeed:
The impact of these changes on your page’s distribution will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity. In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline. Overall, pages should continue to post things that your audience finds meaningful.
Facebook made three changes.
First, they’re going to show more updates from each person’s most important friends. Up until now, Facebook had tried to limit multiple posts in a row from the same person from showing up in feeds, but they’re relaxing that rule now.
Second, posts from friends users care about most will be given higher importance in the news feedback and placed higher on the feed. These could be anything from updates to photos and in some cases still links those people share.
Third, Facebook is going to lessen the prominence of updates where friends commented or liked a story.
More Difficult To Engage Your Fans
Facebook is always tweaking their News Feed. Their goal is to provide the most relevant and wanted items on the feed for each user.
It seems that from the feedback Facebook was getting that users want to see more updates from the people they know. And they don’t want to see just the links people share and the articles they like and comment on.
Instead, people want to see actual updates, photos and replies from friends.
That makes sense. Facebook has always seemed to be a more personal way to communicate with friends and family.
But it can pose an issue for businesses and organizations with pages. It seems that it’ll be even more difficult to engage your audience.
Facebook recommends that you continue to share the content your fans find most useful, interesting and entertaining. When your fans engage with likes, comments and shares it’s a good thing.
But if you aren’t able to get that engagement your fans will probably see fewer of your updates on Facebook in their feeds.
Next Steps
First, analyze the most popular posts you’ve shared on Facebook in the past. Look for clues to why people engaged with those posts the most. Did the post have a photo? Did you mention someone that was included in a photo or story?
Identify the reasons your most popular updates were popular and look to provide more of that type of content.
Second, build your email list in every way possible. Email remains a great channel for communicating with your fans and followers. Unlike your Facebook page, you control the communication.
Do everything you can to get more email subscribers. Start a regular email newsletter. Monthly is a good start. Twice each month would be better.
Share the type of content in your newsletter that your fans love on social media. Images, stories and other content like that is usually popular.
Here are more ideas for your email newsletter.
Third, start adding more regular content to your website. Again, you control the communication on your website. You don’t have to worry about Facebook getting in the way when people are coming to your site to get the content you share.
A blog is a great way to add regular content. A blog post can be as simple as the type of content you’ve been sharing on Facebook.
Video is a great form of content as well.
Final Thought
It’s always frustrating when Facebook changes the rules, but that’s reality. They’re always going to change things for the benefit of users. And users are telling Facebook that they want more regular updates from friends and fewer updates from pages.
So you’ll just have to adapt and with the next steps above you’ll probably be better off in the long run. Start working on it today and before long you’ll be in good shape with your online marketing efforts.
