By: Samantha Hewitt
Facebook is at it again, and by “it” I mean algorithm updates. According to this News Feed FYI blog
that the social network shared on December 4, the latest update is an effort to improve Facebook news feeds by ensuring that users are seeing stories that they actually care about at the top of their feed, while pushing irrelevant or “unwanted” stories lower down. Depending on your preferences, this could mean a lot more (or less) dancing cat videos on your news feed—the power is in your hands!
So how will Facebook accomplish this? Well for one, they are tracking the actions that you take on the site, including liking, commenting, clicking or sharing a post, and will use this information to determine how important that content is to you. Additionally, since mid-November, Facebook says that they have been asking thousands of users each day to rate their news need experience. Some of these surveys will show people two stories that might be in their feed and asked which of the two they’d prefer to see. Facebook has already evaluated how high or low each story should be on your news feed, so your answer will either reaffirm that their algorithm is working or inform them that they’ve got more work to do.
You’re probably wondering if this means that Pages will have an even more difficult time getting their content out to their target audiences; according to Facebook, it shouldn’t have a negative impact on your page:
“If there is a viral story that people do choose to see in the survey, there will be no change to how it is ranked. As viral posts are typically anomalies, and not an important part of distribution for Pages, we don’t think this change will impact your Page’s distribution.”
The key point is that as long as your content is creative enough to catch a user’s attention, then you won’t see negative changes. In addition, a healthy social media advertising budget will help in attracting targeted, quality users to your page and ensuring that your message stays front and center. It’s not uncommon for us to see increases of up to 50% in one month on page reach and engagement when we implement a small-but-mighty ad campaign to go along with the organic content. Sounds pretty amazing, right? Contact us today to find out what we can do for your social media strategy!