Member Article

How Facebook changes will affect your business & what you can do about it

With more than 2.2 billion active monthly users on Facebook, and over one third of these engaging with brands regularly, it can be a powerful tool for business growth that can produce some excellent results, if done in the right way. One thing businesses need to remember is there are changes happening all the time, and it’s important to stay on top of them to stay ahead.

Get up to speed with five of Facebook’s recent changes here:

Facebook is going to favour posts that provide a conversation between family and friends. It will be less about the frequency of posting and more about the quality of the content. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect. With these changes, business pages may see a decrease in reach, video watch time and a decrease in referral traffic. Actions that will help increase your content reach on Facebook are commenting, liking, and sharing content. On the other hand, clicking, watching, and hovering over content will no longer help you increase your reach.
In terms of content, we suggest posting more live videos and sharing conversational content to spark a conversation between users (encouraging audiences to converse with friends). These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussions in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to. A great way to gain engagements is to ask your audience questions and provide content that is useful to them. This is particularly important because pages creating posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution.
Stay away from using engagement bait. Even if it might earn a lot of interactions, it will still be ranked lower in the news feed.
Post in Facebook groups as content in groups is already ranked on audience engagement, so there will be no differences there. Additionally, people tend to be more engaged in groups, so your content will therefore be ranked higher on the news feed.
Sponsored content will not be affected by these changes, so it is worth considering investing more money into this format for the best results.

What can you do right now:

Ask users questions, or share content that encourages a conversation. For example, alert your followers to “tag someone” is a great way of sparking engagement.
Invest more money in sponsored content.
Post less, but make the content you post more meaningful.
Post live videos.
Host a Q&A session.
Post content in Facebook groups, or create a company Facebook group.
Encourage your users to select to see your page in their news feed by clicking “see first in news feed preferences”. This will ensure your followers see posts from your page first, despite the changes.

Facebook is a great channel for businesses to reach their target audiences in new and exciting ways. Think about some of the ways you can start to implement these changes to your page, and you’re guaranteed to see even more exciting results.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Amber Williamson .