Improve Your Company's Marketing By Keeping Up With Facebook's Changes
The algorithm for the Facebook newsfeed changes frequently based on how individuals use it. As a business, you don't really have the option of ignoring Facebook, simply because it is just too good of a marketing tool. However, the changes are geared more toward individuals than toward businesses. To make sure your business is always getting the most effective marketing on the site, you need to keep up with the changes in the algorithm.
Keep it trending
Facebook has increased the importance of trending stories. This causes stories that get a large immediate response to rise to the top of your newsfeed as well as those people who follow your page. On the one hand, this is a good thing. If you're running a marketing campaign, your post might rise to the top of a lot of newsfeeds if it gets a big response as soon as the post goes live. As a marketer you want your audience to respond immediately to your posts. However, the downside of this change is that posts that are important to you may fade from the newsfeed quickly if they don't get a big immediate response. Ultimately, this means that you want to come up with relevant posts that will get your followers to post right away. That's not to say that you should post something irrelevant to your business just to get a response from followers. Sure, you still need to think long-term with your marketing campaigns, but maybe a good way to have long-term success on Facebook is to design your posts so they trend across your network, even if only for a short time.
Rely on your friends
Facebook has also put a greater emphasis on posts from friends and family over posts and stories from businesses and brands. This is particularly challenging for businesses. By definition, a story will be shared less if it shows up in fewer newsfeeds. With that being the case, businesses have to find new ways to make their stories spread on Facebook. One way that some businesses have found is encouraging friends and family to work business mentions into their daily statuses.
These are just a couple recent changes to the algorithm. As a business you'll want to keep up with changes whenever they occur. Plenty of media groups watch and report on the changes to the Facebook algorithm. Make sure you pay attention to at least one of them so you'll know when changes are coming and when they happen.
This article was written by Gary Schwind for CBS Small Business Pulse.