In the March 2018 edition of Masters of Marketing, ITC SEO Consultant Stephanie Ewen talks about the effect Facebook's new algorithm will have on your business page's Facebook posts and what you can do to increase their reach.
Staying Social: What's Facebook's New Algorithm Means for Your Agency
1. Staying Social: What Facebook’s New Algorithm
Means for Your Agency
Is Organic Reach Dead?
Stephanie Ewen
SEO Consultant
2. Housekeeping
A recording of this presentation will be posted at
resources.getitc.com/masters-of-marketing
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Join us on April 19th at 12 p.m. CT for How to Turn Your Website Into
a Lead Generator, hosted by Website Coordinator, Matt Farrell
3. “Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts
from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that
lead us to connect more with each other.”
~Mark Zuckerberg
4. What is the algorithm
change?
Making personal posts from family
and friends more important.
5. How will the change affect business posts?
Personal Posts Commercial Post
6. What can we do to
remain visible?
Likes & Interactions
Shares
Comments
Conversations
7. How should you evaluate your post
content moving forward?
• Is Your Content Engaging
• Engagement is the name of the game
11. What is your goal in sharing content on
Facebook?
Most important questions you can ask yourself:
1. Is it growing an engaged community?
2. Is it driving traffic to my website?
3. Is it gaining email sign ups?
4. Is it increasing sales revenue?
12. Building an audience to sell to via
Facebook or any social media platform is
not a good long term strategy!
15. What type of content should we be
sharing?
Put yourself in your followers shoes, what kind of
content would you want to share with your friends
and family?
17. Thank You!
1. Slides and a recording of today’s presentation will be posted later
today at https://resources.getitc.com/masters-of-marketing
2. Be sure to join us on April 19th at 12 p.m. CT for How to Turn Your
Website Into a Lead Generator, hosted by Website Coordinator, Matt
Farrell
Editor's Notes
Will answer questions at the end.
If you spend any time at all on Facebook. I am sure you have seen videos like this from Tasty and others. As you can see by the number of shares they are wildly popular. However, videos like this and other public/commercial content that has exploded on Facebook the past couple of years is in jeopardy with this change.
Let’s face it there's more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what's in News Feed has shifted away from what Facebook wants to do – which is help us connect with each other (people) not businesses.
Facebook is saying they feel it is their responsibility to make sure their services focus on what is good for people’s well being. Which to them means removing commercial posts out of users news feed and showing more from their friends and family.
They are looking to make the platform back into more of a forum for communicating with one another.
Because Facebook is changing their focus from helping people find relevant content to helping them have more meaningful social interactions, the first noticeable change will be what shows up in a users news feed. We are already seeing less posts from pages we follow in our own news feed.
As it rolls out, users will see less public content such as posts from businesses, brands and media. Post on left
You may be asking this very question – what can we do to remain visible?
Until this update your agency’s posts could have a passive experience. Until this update as long as you had followers like or share your post, you had a pretty good chance others would see it.
Didn’t put this example up here to be political, I knew I could find a post with heavy engagement on this page.
Point out the number of likes, shares and the amount of conversation happening on this post.
1-1: While FB is going to penalize content from business pages, they will still reward content with high engagement. But….not just any kind of engagement.
No longer will post likes, emotions or even shares get your post in a news feed.
Lets look at that post from President Trump again…
You can see by the two comments that are visible, there is a lot of conversation happening. This is what Facebook is going to be looking for from business posts. Now, I am not saying that every single one of your posts have to have thousands of comments and 50+ replies to those comments. There is no hard fast number given. But it has to show a conversation happening. This isn’t only limited to posts…this also includes people leaving a review of your business. Reply to them, if warranted ask a question, spark a conversation.
Some agencies are using live videos to talk about particular topics, these will fall under the same scrutiny as your text posts. Be sure your audience is asking questions. A good way to handle this is have one person live on the video and have another person moderating while watching questions that get asked in the comments.
Another win will be if your posts manage to get a comment by a friend of a customer who has shared your post. This send a signal to Facebook that your post is meaningful to users.
Begging is never flattering but…there is nothing wrong with creating posts that actual ask for engagement.
Post 1 – as you can see in the post on the left. They are literally telling them to share this post with their friends. Which when this was posted did wonders for their organic position. Now you will need more than just likes and shares.
Post 2 – The post on the right is a bit more up to date with a good way to ask for engagement. A caption this prompt is sure to get multiple comments along with some likes and shares…I mean who wouldn’t want to share a picture of a cute little piglet like this one? Disclaimer….this is not my pig.
Example: Now how can you do the same thing? Most of you receive content from your carriers that you currently share on your FB page. So instead of just sharing their post or article. Give your opinion on the content of the article. Ask a probative question that could spark a conversation in the comments.
Some of you may have hundreds if not thousands of followers on your Facebook page. In order to make sure your posts are always seen by these people, creating a group can help you out.
Groups offer a great way to segment your followers and give them hyper focused posts.
Essentially how you would manage this is general and corporate posts get posted to your page. If you create groups segmented by line of business, you publish posts specific to say auto insurance.
If you are a multi-location agency, you can create groups for each location and post city/location specific posts to those groups.
You can also make a group called (for example) “Texas Insurance Q&A” or “Houston Insurance Tips” and they could use the group as a forum to post informational things and answer questions that would help the community (plus, build up their agency’s reputation).
Each time you post to a group each member gets notified, unlike when you post to your regular page/timeline.
Groups can also help gain referrals if you allow members to invite others to the group.
If reaching people outside of your existing followers and building your audience is your goal for Facebook then focusing on the tips we have covered so far about creating engaging posts are important to follow.
These are the questions you need ask before you publish content to Facebook. No longer will you be able to just blindly post content and have people actually see it.
Before you publish that next piece of content to Facebook ask these four questions.
So I have shared with you why Facebook is making this change. I have showed you examples of posts that are getting the kind of engagement you are looking for as well as the difference between the post types that are affected by this recent update.
But you still may be asking….what should we do?
You don’t own your social media platforms. You do however own your website and your email lists. Build your audience there, social media should be a secondary means of communicating with your audience.
Now, I know I just said that it is better to build up the audience on your website and your email list. But, Facebook has some amazing advertising features that will allow you to get your posts in front of more people. Not just by volume but they have one of the best ad platforms for ad targeting.
As you can see from the two examples here, one is a sponsored/paid post asking people to sign up for their service the other takes you to their website to learn more about their fundraising tool. So not only do you have the ability to target a specific set of demographics, you can create ads to build your email list or drive traffic to your site.
What were the questions to ask yourself about your content?
Is it growing an engaged community?
Driving traffic to website?
Email sign ups?
Know what your goal is before you invest in social advertising or completely revamping your social media strategy, if you have one. Which bring me to another point…if you don’t have a strategy….CREATE ONE!
When you do get comments on your posts, be sure to join in on the conversation. Even if they aren’t asking a direct question, try to find ways to stay in the conversation. This is not a Ronco Dehydrator…you can’t set it and forget it.
Also, go local…share content that is relevant to your local audiences. Even if it is just a fun event that is happening in your town or nearby.
Go and create that type of content. It is important to know your ideal customer/audience member.
Make every post count – look for ways to cut through the noise.
Listen to what your audience is already saying. What questions are your CSRs fielding on the phone? What questions do you get asked the most?
If you decide to use paid advertising, start small and test every ad.
Decide ahead of time how much you are willing to spend per conversion (email sign up, visit to website etc)
How much will you need to spend to convert the number of customer you want to gain?
Make small changes while testing, change one thing at a time so you are sure what really works and what doesn’t
If you are targeting your audience correctly, you should immediately see a return.