When Facebook Changes

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook is reaffirming their goal of being a platform for meaningful social interaction. The full text of his statement is here, and already business and social media professionals are heralding the end of days for pages getting any kind of organic reach.

I highly recommend these videos and blogs from other respected members of the social media marketing community. Their prognosis is far less depressing than many others have claimed.

Here are the links for you to read or watch:
https://www.facebook.com/smexaminer/videos/vb.272796339382/10156042221879383/?type=2&theater
https://www.jonloomer.com/2018/01/12/facebook-news-feed-is-changing/
https://www.facebook.com/rmulready/videos/1761581243872886/
https://www.monicalouie.com/facebooks-news-feed-update/

For the TL;DR version, here are the highlights:

Facebook will be prioritizing family and friends' posts over public content (read: business pages posts to their profile), and showing less public content in general.

If your followers are not currently liking, commenting, and sharing your content, your organic reach will continue to suffer - in fact, posting more than a few times a week with low- to medium-quality posts will not get you very much return for your time.

It would be better to post rarely with something of substance that starts a meaningful conversation than to post all the time.

Conversations between real people will come before posts with very little interaction. That means conversations between the page and people and between two people on the page's post.

This trend has been coming for a long time, and Facebook has been working on cracking down on spammers, fake news, and click-baiters. (Timeline of Facebook updates here: https://wallaroomedia.com/facebook-newsfeed-algorithm-change-history/)

Posts scheduled with outside schedulers - like Hootsuite and Buffer - will suffer compared to posts scheduled with Facebook's internal scheduler.

What you can do as a business:

Invite your followers to change their Facebook settings to 'See First'. When looking at your page, followers can click on the button that says 'following' to select See First to prioritize your business page.

If you have a Facebook Group, or have thought about starting one, now might be a good time. Group posts have higher view rates than typical business page posts and have higher engagement with and among users.

Facebook prefers videos, especially Facebook Live videos, so these videos will have the greatest reach and opportunity for engagement.

Promote discussion among your followers, especially by encouraging them to interact with each other.

Advertisers are likely to see similar costs per click, as the climate for ads is not changing significantly.

Be more strategic with what you post, even if that means posting less often. Remember, quality is better than quantity in this climate.

Relevant and timely information will be preferred by Facebook (and users!).

Whether you choose to form a Group or not, work to grow a climate on your page that fosters discussion. Avoid click- or engagement-bait, but ask questions that garner long-form answers, and respond to followers as apropriate to keep the discussion going.