You may have noticed that you have fewer memes asking you to share to show your support of homeless kittens and kids with cancer in your newsfeed. No, your Facebook friends haven’t finally come to their senses. However, Facebook has - and it’s something you need to know about.
Recently, Facebook announced that its new algorithm will bury “like-bait” posts, which is basically any post that directly asks users to “like”, “share” or "comment" on it - standard calls to action for Facebook business page updates.
The goal of this is to prevent spammy and duplicate posts from showing up in your feed. This is good news for your personal Facebook feed, but bad news for marketers who aren’t aware of the algorithm update.
Here’s what you need to do to adjust your Facebook marketing strategy given the recent change:
How to Beat Facebook's New Algorithm Update
1. Create High Quality Content
The truth is you don’t want to have to resort to cheap tactics in order to get your fans to like and share your content. By creating high quality blog posts that speak to your audience, not only will you get more interaction on your Facebook page, but you’ll also increase your brand awareness overall.
2. Adjust Your Calls To Action
Just because Facebook doesn’t want you to boss people around into liking and sharing your content doesn’t mean you don’t need to give them some direction. For example, ask open ended questions to get the conversation going. Comments and shares are more valuable than likes on your Facebook page anyway. Comments and shares are more valuable than likes on your Facebook page. Click To Tweet
3. Invest in Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads and promoted posts have the potential to be very targeted and result in high quality traffic and conversions for your Facebook business page. Even $250/month can make a huge difference in the number of impressions you’re able to get on your posts.
4. Don't Be Self Promotional
Posts that do nothing but push people to buy your product and/or desperately ask them to enter your contest or sweepstakes without context will get buried. Also, don't copy/paste content from your ad campaigns into your posts. Facebook is on to your game.
The primary focus for the change in your Facebook marketing strategy is in the calls to action that you include in your posts. Previously, it wasn’t a big deal to ask for likes or shares - or if you’re on Twitter, retweets (in fact, including those types of CTAs leads to a much higher engagement rate - on Twitter, asking for retweets can increase retweets by 23x). Now you’ll have to adjust your calls to action a bit if you want to maximize the visibility of the posts on your Facebook business page.
Need some help with your Facebook business page? Contact us today to inquire about our ongoing social media management services or our social media training and consultation packages.
well that was pretty obvious solutions.
I think the news here is the algo update, not necessarily the solutions to get around them. They may be obvious, but if you don’t know about the like-bait part of the update your posts would probably get buried.
Somebody once told me that knowing is half the battle, and in this case I think it’s closer to 80%.
So in short..facebook sucks