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Facebook are changing their newsfeed to promote posts from friends of family. The change is part of strategic shift where they are strengthening the community parts of Facebook at the expense of advertising.
The changes will have effects on brand pages with low engagement on their posts. It can also be noticed that Facebook Group posts are often prioritized higher in the newsfeed, above content from brands in many cases.
In this episode of the One Minute Digital podcast I go through the implications this will have on Facebook marketing for brands.
Key take aways:
- Facebook are changing their newsfeed to promote posts that are related to family and friends, ahead of brand pages.
- This to make the platform more valuable for their end-users, and to even-out the organic reach.
- Brand pages with low engagement will see even lower engagement.
- Posts from Facebook Groups, which family and friends are engaging with will be higher ranked in the newsfeed.
- Being mentioned in Facebook Groups will become increasingly important for brands, Facebook is also preparing advertising options in Facebook Groups.
- Reaching users organically on Facebook for brands may require the use of influencers in the future, similar to what brands are doing on Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
Facebook changing their newsfeed – Transcript
Hi everyone and welcome!
Today we will talk about Facebook and the changes they are making to their newsfeed in order to promote content from friend and family, ahead of content from brand pages.
According to Mark Zuckenberg this is a response to make Facebook more interesting and valuable for the end users. Changing the newsfeed is the beginning really of a major change in the platform during 2018 for all Facebook products.
It’s not really a shock, because the Facebook organic reach has plummeted from 16% in 2012 to 1-2% in 2014, according to Adweek. So they had to do something, and this is the start of it.
If you are running a brandpage today, I guess you are a little bit worried if your engagement will go down because of these updates that they are doing to the newsfeed. Facebook themselves have said that brand pages that have few comments and likes on their content will see a decline of engagement.
This is because the content that will be promoted in the newsfeeds will be posts that are more liked and are commented by the closest friends to the users who is viewing the post.
Already now I think I can see that some posts are actually being more promoted than before, and usually these posts are liked or commented by my friends. I also have seen that posts that are originating from Facebook Groups and are commented by my friends will be ranked even higher in the newsfeed.
As I have said before, and also written on the digitalbydaniel.com blog is that Facebook Groups is a powerful marketing tool when you as a brand gets mentioned in those groups.
Last year (2017) Facebook announced that they will allow advertising within Facebook Groups, so I think the changes that are being made now is part of that strategy. It means that Facebook will be centered on groups in the future.
If you are running a brand page on Facebook you need to think about (as always) to create content that people want to engage with, that they want to comment on. You shouldn’t frame the content so that people comment on it, but the content should spark interest enough for commenting to occur.
Facebook themselves give the tip that brands should use video or live-video. The brand pages I have been running earlier usually have a higher engagement on video posts that traditional ones. So I totally agree with what they are saying.
I also think that brands should look into other ways of changing or extending their marketing on Facebook. For example on Instagram or on YouTube we all know that influencer marketing is quite powerful. Because it’s going to be more difficult to reach out to an audience on Facebook organically. If you do not already now know who are your brands influencers on Facebook, it’s a good time to find out.
Alright, that’s it for this time. Thank you so much for listening, if you want to come into contact with me go to Digital By Daniel, digitalbydaniel.com. You can find a contact form there, links to my social channels and a transcript from this podcast which can be handy if you do not understand what I’m saying.
See you next time!