How to make Facebook’s algorithm change work for you · 2018. 5. 25. · Mr. Zuckerberg also...

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1 © Reshift Media 2018 How to make Facebook’s algorithm change work for you Turn a crisis for other brands into an opportunity for you

Transcript of How to make Facebook’s algorithm change work for you · 2018. 5. 25. · Mr. Zuckerberg also...

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How to make Facebook’s algorithm changework for youTurn a crisis for other brands into an opportunity for you

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RESHIFT MEDIAReshift Media is a digital marketing organization specializing in customized social media, search, design, development and software services. We proudly work with brands and agencies across a variety of industries in 20 countries worldwide.

www.reshiftmedia.com

1-855-367-3631

[email protected]

/reshiftmedia

/reshiftmedia

/company/reshiftmedia

!

!

!

Don’t miss our upcoming Facebook Live session on

January 18th at 3:00PM ET where we will discuss

what brands should be doing to maximize their exposure in

Facebook’s updated News Feed, and where we will address

live any questions you may have.THURSDAY

18JAN

http://rshft.com/fblive

Attend Our Live Q&A About The News Feed Changes!

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IntroductionAs you may already be aware, on January 11, 2018 Facebook announced a major change to its News Feed algorithm that will profoundly impact brands’ ability to reach people on Facebook through organic distribution(see: http://rshft.com/announcement). The change prioritizes interactions between friends and family over company-generated posts, meaning that content consumed directly from business pages on Facebook will shrink and content that is shared & talked about between friends will grow.

In particular, posts that generate “interactions” such as comments and shares will be weighted more heavily than posts that generate just likes or reactions. In addition, posts with longer comments will be weighted more heavily than those with short ones.

“Interactions” is the new “Engagement”

Many news organizations and blogs are decrying the move, using terms such as “apocalyptic”, “betrayal” and “nail in the coffin”. We here at Reshift Media are not quite as pessimistic as others about the changes. We believe that the reduction (or even the possible elimination) of the “engagement bait” posts that have been dominating Facebook’s News Feed for far too long is a major opportunity for high-quality organizations with strong customer engagement strategies to finally stand out from the crowd.

Declining organic reach is nothing new. Facebook has been decreasing the amount of organic reach brands are able to achieve for some time – from 50% to 20% to 10% to 5% and most recently down to around 2.5%, on average. Smart brands and agencies that have already been pursuing engagement strategies and building solid content to adjust for this declining reach should see less impact than brands whose Facebook content gets little shares or comments.

The changes to the News Feed are happening quickly, so we recommend brands and agencies adjust their Facebook strategies as soon as possible to minimize the impact to their reach. We have several recommendations that brands can pursue to not only survive, but potentially thrive, on Facebook going forward.

How Facebook’s News Feed is Changing

Facebook announced last week that they are updating the News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts that create conversations and interactions between people. In their definition, these are posts that people share and react to, and that “inspire back-and-forth discussion” in the comments.

Mr. Zuckerberg also stated that people browsing Facebook will see more content from friends and family and less from brands and publishers. In addition, posts that generate comments, shares and messages will be prioritized more than posts that only generate likes. Not only that, but Facebook has also stated that posts with longer comments will be weighted more heavily than those with short ones, as longer comments indicate a greater level of engagement with the content.

Of particular note is that Facebook has explicitly said that pre-recorded videos, no matter how entertaining or informative they are, will be de-prioritized in the feed as watching video tends to be a more “passive” exercise that typically does not inspire much conversation. This is a major reversal for Facebook, as video has gained incredible prominence in the News Feed in recent years and has been an effective way for brands to organically generate reach and engagement.

“We’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from

focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.”- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

“There will be less video. Video is an important part of the ecosystem. It’s been consistently growing. But it’s more

passive in nature. There’s less conversation on videos, particularly public videos.”- Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed, Facebook

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However, Facebook has specifically called out live video as a continuing opportunity, citing that live videos tend to generate six times as many interactions as regular videos, which is the type of person-to-person interaction they are looking for in the updated News Feed.

A bit of a surprise to some people was that both Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook vice president Adam Mosseri have mentioned Facebook Groups (see: http://rshft.com/groups) as a growing opportunity for person-to-person interactions. In fact, Mr. Zuckerberg specifically mentioned Groups alongside friends and family as an area of content people can expect to see more of in their News Feed. This is something that has been in the works for some time, as Facebook has been recently increasing their focus on Groups and implementing several improvements. The company held its first ever “Communities Summit” in June 2017 where they announced a number of new features for Group admins to support their communities on Facebook, which looks to have been a precursor to this latest New Feed update. They also announced Groups for Business pages

(see: http://rshft.com/group-pages), allowing brands to create their own distinct communities and feeds.

The timing of the update has not been specifically outlined, but Facebook has indicated that the philosophy of encouraging “social interactions” more than “popularity” will be rolled out across all of their products over several months. The News Feed is the first area that will see these changes, which are expected to be rolled out very quickly.

Does This Affect Advertising?

According to Facebook, this change will have no direct impact on how advertising works, as it is a separate system with its own algorithm. This means the reach and effectiveness of video ads and other ad units will not be directly impacted by the News Feed updates. Any campaigns that are currently underway or planned should not be impacted.

Although companies will still be able to reach people via advertising, we at Reshift are advising our clients to expect the cost of advertising to increase. Facebook advertising has historically been a cost-effective way to reach a very targeted audience when compared to other advertising methods, however, with organic reach being greatly reduced we expect brands to increase their advertising spend, which will undoubtedly have an inflationary effect on cost.

The degree of the impact won’t be known for several months,but we are recommending that our clients be prepared for a 35-45% increase in cost in the short-term, depending on the level of competition in their particular industry.

Why is Facebook Doing this?

Although many people have speculated that these changes are being made in response to the issues Facebook has faced regarding “fake news,” the company is has indicated that the update is not aimed at their ongoing efforts to address this concern.

Instead, Facebook says that the motivation for the changes is to improve people’s happiness and well-being. Instead of simply spending time on Facebook, the company says that it wants the time to be “well spent”. To support this position, Facebook has cited studies conducted by academics and by the company itself which differentiate “bad” effects of social media when it is being passively consumed versus more “positive” effects when the person is actively engaged.

Here’s a brief summary of the rationale (as provided by Facebook in a December 15, 2017 post):

The bad:

In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward. In one experiment, University of Michigan students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than students assigned to post or talk to friends on Facebook. A study

“You can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.”- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

Source: Facebook

“It’s not about addressing false news or other forms of

problematic content, though that is a continued area of focus and investment for us.”- Adam Mosseri,

Head of News Feed, Facebook

Source:Facebook

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from UC San Diego and Yale found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey. Though the causes aren’t clear, researchers hypothesize that reading about others online might lead to negative social comparison — and perhaps even more so than offline, since people’s posts are often more curated and flattering. Another theory is that the internet takes people away from social engagement in person.

The good:

On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being. This ability to connect with relatives, classmates, and colleagues is what drew many of us to Facebook in the first place, and it’s no surprise that staying in touch with these friends and loved ones brings us joy and strengthens our sense of community.

A study we conducted with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University found that people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness. The positive effects were even stronger when people talked with their close friends online. Simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network. Other peer-reviewed longitudinal research and experiments have found similar positive benefits between well-being and active engagement on Facebook.

Others have speculated that the update is designed to force brands to buy more advertising to reach their desired audience – essentially ending the “free ride” brands have enjoyed since Facebook’s inception. While we can’t say if this is indeed one of the motivations driving the update, there is little doubt that the change will result in brands spending more ad dollars on Facebook to reach their current and prospective customers.

Facebook has publically stated that they believe the update may actually decrease the amount of time people spend on their platform, but that ultimately people will be happier with their overall experience.

If the amount of time people spend does in fact decrease, this will likely contribute to the inflation of advertising costs,

as there will be more brands attempting to buy ads in an environment of shrinking inventory.

How the Update Impacts Brands

Facebook’s News Feed has for some time emphasized posts that generate interactions such as likes, comments and shares between friends, but it has also surfaced other public content that its algorithm expects people will find interesting based on broader trends across the network. With

the new update this will still be true, but the emphasis on posts that come from within peoples’ social networks will be weighted even more heavily than previously.

As a result, Facebook has been very clear that they expect the News Feed update to have a negative effect on the reach of “public” content created by brands and media outlets. However, this does not mean that organic reach is “dead.” In fact, the company has been careful to point out that brand posts are not being removed from the

News Feed, but that the new emphasis on person-to-person interactions will reduce the amount of content consumed directly from pages.

Companies that typically do not receive many comments and shares on their posts can expect to see a substantial decrease in organic reach – potentially to zero. Those who have content that drives conversation can expect a lesser decline.

“I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of

engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

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Source: Facebook

What this means is that companies who mainly blast out self-serving marketing messages with little value will, in fact, see a major decrease in organic distribution.

To be successful, brands need to do a better job of engaging and interacting with people and encouraging them to interact with each other.

It is also important to realize that the value of a “fan” has been substantially decreased. Even if a person follows a brand’s page, the odds of them actually seeing posts from that company have never been lower. As such, we do not recommend investing any ad dollars in growing your fanbase. We are surprised to find many brands continue to run “Facebook Like” campaigns, which are designed to encourage people to follow the brand’s page. These dollars are better spent on attracting prospective customers to the company’s website or showcasing the company’s products.

Although we do not recommend spending money to earn new fans, that does not mean that it is a bad idea to continue to grow your social audience through organic means. In fact, we see several opportunities for brands to continue to reach and engage current and prospective customers, which we will outline shortly.

What Not To Do

Although there is a lot of speculation about how significant the impact will be for brands and media companies, we have yet to see what exactly the outcome will be. Yes, we expect that this update will have a significant

effect on how brands use Facebook to engage with

customers and drive business results, but as we will outline it also opens up some new opportunities. Facebook continues to be the largest social network on the planet and has incredible data and tools to help any company – big or small – grow their business.

Some companies may be tempted to implement strategies to “game the system” by creating low-quality content which encourages commenting, tagging or sharing with little value created. These strategies are called “engagement baiting” and have been under scrutiny by Facebook for some time. The company has developed

a machine learning model designed to detect different types of engagement bait and remove them from the News Feed. Pages that are found to repeatedly use engagement bait to artificially gain reach in News Feed will be demoted

How to Make the Algorithm Change Work For You

We believe that the January 2018 update to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is good news for brands who are engaging with their customers and producing quality content. Based on what Facebook is saying, we can expect “click bait” posts to decrease in volume, which frees up space for higher-quality content that generates interactions to be surfaced.

This means that fewer brand posts will be seen overall, but the ones that are seen will be the ones that generate more meaningful interactions between people. Although more difficult to create, the upside is that these types of posts are of higher value to both the person and the brand.

“As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to

Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”- Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed, Facebook

Don’tPanic!

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As outlined previously, Facebook has been decreasing organic reach for some time, so we at Reshift have implemented several strategies to increase brands’ distribution opportunities. In light of the update to the algorithm, we have developed a list of the top 10 opportunities for brands to consider in order to minimize the impact of the update, and possibly even grow their exposure.

1. Integrate your paid and organic Facebook strategies

Many companies view their Facebook advertising and organic strategies as completely separate. Going forward, we recommend integrating organic and paid planning to use ad dollars as a means to “prime the pump” for organic reach.

In our view, whether a post is paid for or not is irrelevant. In both cases the objective should be to create informative, interesting content that results in activity on behalf of the recipient. In the case of Facebook advertising you just happen to be paying to distribute the content to a specific target audience – it should still be quality content.

2. Reach the right people with the right posts at the right time

Traditional “mass media” facilitated a one-to-many means of communication, while the rise of social media opened up the opportunity for a one-to-few or even a one-to-one means of communicating information or ideas. However, over time many companies shifted back into “mass media” mode where they create a single “generic” post which is syndicated to a large homogeneous audience.

With the changes to the News Feed, posts that do not create comments and shares will not gain distribution. General posts that are aimed at a homogeneous audience typically do not inspire interaction, so brands need to get more serious about how they think about creating content on Facebook. In some ways, the News Feed update is a good wake-up call to get back into the mindset of thinking about social media as a one-to-few means of communicating.

To achieve a one-to-few approach, we recommend analyzing your Facebook insights (see: http://rshft.com/insights) to understand the makeup of your audience. Insights has a tremendous amount of information about your fanbase and who typically responds to your posts and at what time of day. If you have a local business page, you can even see when people are physically near your business location and what their age/gender is.

With this information in-hand, you can then logically segment your audience into smaller focused groups along a number of factors, including:

- Geography (neighborhoods, cities, regions) - Demographics (age, gender) - Interests (sports, travel, television) - Language

Once you know your audience groups, you can tailor your content to each audience individually in order to make it as relevant as possible. The more relevant it is, the more likely your fans will interact with the content which will aid in its distribution. You can even take the same basic message and re-write it for your various audiences, if appropriate. You can then use Facebook’s targeting capabilities to share each piece of content with the correct target group.

In addition, you should time your posts to coincide with when your audience is most active on Facebook. Facebook metrics don’t tell you when each demographic is active, but you can identify in general when your fans overall are online. This will give you the best possible chance of reaching the right people at the right time.

The key to this approach is to challenge each piece if content to ensure it:

- Is relevant to the audience• Is the copy written using language and a tone that will

resonate with them?• Is the photo attractive to them?

- Encourages interaction• Are you asking a relevant question of your audience?• Is the piece of information you are sharing something

they will care about?• Are they likely to want to comment on it or share it with

a friend?

3. Produce content that generates interactions

This recommendation may seem somewhat self-evident, but our list clearly would not be complete without it. Now, more than ever, companies need to challenge themselves to really think about the needs of their audience segments in order to create and share content that people will react to and converse about.

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The days of creating a funny meme that received a bunch of likes to “go viral” are clearly behind us.

Again, we see this as good news. Few people actually enjoyed seeing their Facebook feed crammed full of low-quality click-bait, so by demoting these in the News Feed Facebook is making it easier for legitimate companies producing interesting information to be seen.

The issue is that what constitutes “interesting” varies from brand to brand and from customer to customer. The key point to keep in mind is that the content needs to generate an interaction such as a comment or share to be deemed of high value, so focusing on strategies to generate conversation is key. Be careful not to fall into the trap of accidentally producing engagement bait though, as this will have the opposite effect on your visibility.

DON’T: Ask yes/no questions or purposely try to illicit low-value engagement:

DO: Create relevant content and ask meaningful questions that spur community conversation:

One strategy we have found effective in generating interactions is to create posts that share customer stories. This is particularly effective when your product or service is connected to a life event such as buying a car, building a house or getting a new puppy. Celebrating your customers’ stories is a great way to generate conversation with the customer whose story you are telling, which in turn surfaces the content to their friends and family who often interact with the content to congratulate the person or ask them questions.

Beyond creating more interactions, this approach has several positive effects:

- Helps solidify your relationship with the customer. By sharing their story from your brand page you make them feel special, which everyone enjoys.

- Positions your company as caring about customers. Your brand will feel more real and authentic which increases affinity.

- Introduces your business to new prospective customers in a very positive light. These customer stories essentially become brand testimonials.

4. Focus on quality over quantity

More than ever, the quality of your content should take priority over the frequency of posting. Many brands we speak to post on Facebook daily (or even more frequently) in order to artificially increase their overall reach. The reach of each post is actually quite small, but because they post so frequently each little post adds up to a better overall monthly reach number.

Under the new algorithm, this strategy may be extremely detrimental to your brand’s visibility if the majority of your posts receive little interaction.

To be successful, quality is the name of the game. We recommend brands segment their audience as previously discussed and carefully consider each post from the perspective of the recipient to ensure it is relevant to the audience you are targeting. In our experience, unless you are receiving incredible interactions and huge reach for every post, 3-4 Facebook posts per week is more than enough. Anything beyond this may result in people ignoring your posts, which will lead to a decrease in the number of interactions and therefore reach.

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5. Create a Facebook Group

Facebook has called out Groups (see: http://rshft.com/groups) as an opportunity to generate user interactions, and has even mentioned Groups content as receiving the same level of News Feed distribution as posts from family and friends.

Facebook recently introduced Groups for pages, allowing page admins to create or connect sub-groups to their pages. This creates a place for niche or smaller audiences that may not have had a space to come together before now. Groups provide an opportunity for a closer relationship between brands and their customers. Businesses can communicate directly with their superfans and determine how their customers really feel towards their company/product/service. Group users are able to chat with each other, and to the page admins directly.

6. Go Live on Facebook

If you have not already tried it, Facebook allows any individual or brand to “go live”

with video anytime. Although the company has stated that pre-recorded video will likely be shown less, they specifically mentioned live video as generating more interactions and therefore being of higher value in the updated News Feed.

Facebook Live has several interesting benefits for brands:

- Livestreaming receives 6 times the engagement of regular video which helps you “break through” Facebook’s algorithm to gain additional distribution.

- Only 28% of marketers are using Facebook Live, which makes it an underused marketing opportunity.

- When you “go live,” Facebook notifies your page’s fans which represents a great opportunity to reach people. It is unknown if this will change in the update, but as of now the notification is still present.

What video you shoot depends on your business and customers. Some of the more popular ideas include:

- Host a live Q&A - Behind-the scenes/live tours - Breaking news - Contest or challenge - Demos/how-tos - Events/conferences - Interviews - Product launches - Explain a product - Reoccurring video show - Answer customer questions from your blog or Facebook

page

In order to ensure a successful live event, we recommend the following:

- Plan out the video ahead of time and ensure it is relevant to your target audience. As it is live, you don’t have the luxury of re-takes and editing to get it exactly how you want it, so be sure to have a solid script and plan before turning the camera on.

- Promote the event ahead of time to increase the number of people watching. This can be done through promotion on your website, Facebook ads (including an event ad), promotion on other platforms (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn), promotion within your store(s) to existing customers via signage or word-of-mouth and/or an email blast to subscribers, among others.

- Ask users to submit questions ahead of time so that you have something to talk about in the first few minutes before the live questions start coming in

7. Watch Out For Facebook Stories

Stories haven’t really taken off on Facebook like they have on Instagram, but that may change as brands try to find more ways to get in front of people organically. Though Facebook Stories is currently limited to personal profiles, TechCrunch (see: http://rshft.com/stories) recently confirmed that this feature will be rolling out to all pages in the coming months.

Before it becomes widely popular with brands, be the first to jump on Stories by implementing it as soon as it is enabled on your page. As we’ve discovered on Instagram, Stories are a great way for companies to reach people by offering interesting content such as behind-the-scenes videos and how-to instructions. Plus, Facebook displays the latest Stories at the very top of the News Feed on both desktop and the mobile app, offering incredible organic exposure.

Source: Facebook

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8. Motivate people to share on your behalf

We at Reshift have often talked about the importance of engaging your customers and fans to share information about your brand on their own personal Facebook page. This means that they create their own post about your company and share it, as opposed to sharing a post from your brand page to their friends and family.

This concept is crucial for all social media marketing professionals because the reach of personal pages has long outperformed business pages. With this latest algorithm change, it is clear that person-to-person interaction will be even more favored over business-to-person. This opens up an opportunity for smart brands to better engage their best fans to increase their distribution and reach new potential customers.

Being successful with this approach involves developing high quality content and a strong customer engagement strategy.

One of the best ways to encourage people to talk about your company on social media is to create a strong blog on your company website with interesting information about your industry, customers, products or other relevant content. You should actively promote your blog to your existing customers through newsletters, in-store experiences and social media. You may even want to consider putting a modest ad budget against promoting your content on several social networks (not just Facebook). Ensuring the post is search optimized is also important to increase its discoverability via Google and Bing.

A strong blog can encourage people to share your content on social media

Your objective with these efforts is to encourage people to come to your blog to read it. Once they are on your article, encourage them to share their thoughts on social media (including Facebook, of course). When the person shares the article via their personal profile, their reach within their social circles will be superior to what you could achieve as a brand page, which will allow you to reach new prospective customers. If they click through, read and share the article, then you achieve even more distribution.

We earlier discussed how sharing customer stories from your brand page is a good way to generate interactions. This concept is also very powerful when the customer shares their own story about your brand via their social

networks. This is particularly powerful for brands that create experiences – such as restaurants, hotels, event companies and other similar businesses.

Outside of overtly asking people to talk about you on Facebook (which is often quite difficult), there are several proven strategies to encourage people to share their positive experiences:

- Create content on your website that is about them. This could be a celebration of their stories (similar to the car example in idea #3) or something as simple as a “customer of the week”. The idea is to create website content that is about them, their community or something they care about. People enjoy being part of the conversation and will almost always share it to their own social networks on your behalf.

- Surprise and delight them. Give them an unexpected surprise such as a table visit from the head chef, a surprise credit on their account, or a discount for repeat visitors. This is where your on-the-ground customer engagement strategy is critical - go the extra mile to make their experience a great one and they will naturally talk about it on social media.

- Use your store to provide visual cues that your brand “gets” social media. Bring social media into the “real world” by integrating social elements into your physical stores. This could include ideas such as displaying hashtags alongside menu items or prominently posting the company’s social handles.

- Give people some “fame”. The idea is to show that you care about their social posts and want to share them with other people. This could include ideas such as having digital screens in your facility display a running feed of brand mentions so people can see themselves, or hanging up printed posters of a this week’s best customer photos from Facebook/Instagram.

9. Make your content a “must have” for your followers

Although the News Feed determines what content people see, they can manually override the algorithm to select people and pages that they want to see first in their feed. This can be done two ways:

1) Via their personal “News Feed Preferences.” People can click “News Feed Preferences” and then “prioritize who to see first”.

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2) On the brand page itself. People visiting your brand page can click on “following” and then choose “see first”.

Although the ability to prioritize pages is not a well-known feature and involves some work on behalf of your fans, companies with highly engaged customers can achieve some success in teaching people to take this step to ensure they receive content from the brand.

The key to this approach is to make your content a “must have” for your fans. Again, what exactly appeals to people varies from brand to brand and even between customer segments within a brand. We recommend conducting user profiling and segmentation to ensure you understand what value you bring to your customers in order to create the type of content they absolutely must have.

We encourage brainstorming content within two major “buckets”:

a) Informational/tactical: Content that informs people or provides some utility.

- Deals/offers/coupons/flyers: Some customer segments love a deal, which can be a strong motivator to take an extra step to ensure they get “the best” deals available. One strategy we often use is to offer some deals only on Facebook and use other avenues such as the company’s website or email newsletter to promote that exclusive deals can only be found there.

- Menu items/specials/schedules: Many businesses provide their products or services based on a schedule, which may be important information for customers to be aware of. For example, someone who frequently visits a particular restaurant may want to be kept up-to-date about menu changes or daily specials.

- News/events: Become the “go to” information source in your field so that followers don’t want to miss an update, otherwise they will be “out of the loop”.

- How-tos: Become a resource in your industry for how to do things.

b) Entertainment: Content that entertains people or brings them some enjoyment. - Comedy/satire - Quizzes/contests

10. Measure and manage the right things

As they say – what gets measured gets done. To that end, we recommend taking a hard look at how you measure your Facebook performance to ensure it is aligned with the new algorithm update. When creating content for your brand page, less emphasis should be placed on “vanity” metrics such as page or post likes and more focus should be placed on post interactions (comments, shares) and reach. Posts achieving strong interactions and reach should be viewed as a success, even if they did not generate as many likes as other posts.

Beyond measuring the reach of posts you create, we also recommend monitoring for brand mentions across all social networks to see how frequently people are creating their own posts about your brand. This will be an important measurement to understand if your content and offline strategies are encouraging people to use their personal profiles to promote your brand.

ConclusionsAlthough a change of this magnitude will naturally lead to a period of uncertainty and concern by those affected, we believe that the News Feed update creates an opportunity for brands to re-examine the low-engagement “mass media” approach they may be taking today. At this point it is unknown exactly how profound the effect will be on brand reach, but there is little doubt that lower-interaction brands will see a decrease in their Facebook effectiveness. Now is the time from brands to be implementing meaningful changes which will not only improve Facebook results, but also business drivers such as customer engagement, customer satisfaction and new customer acquisition.

We at Reshift Media expect that the next few months will be a major period of adjustment as the impact of the new changes take effect. If you implement the recommendations in this guide that apply to your business and are diligent about focusing on interactions as your main objective, your company has a significant opportunity to out-perform your competitors who are slower to adapt.

For more information on this and other social media, search and other digital marketing topics, please visit our blog atwww.reshiftmedia.com.

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Don’t miss our upcoming Facebook Live session on

January 18th at 3:00PM ET where we will discuss

what brands should be doing to maximize their exposure in

Facebook’s updated News Feed, and where we will address

live any questions you may have.THURSDAY

18JAN

http://rshft.com/fblive

Attend Our Live Q&A About The News Feed Changes!