As you may be aware, Facebook has
introduced some pesky layout changes recently, and more significantly it has
once again tweaked its algorithm over the past few months. Some of the major
changes that came into effect in April in particular have been causing
headaches for businesses as they have impacted how business pages operate. On Wednesday
here at Dungarvan Enterprise Centre, Mags our Centre Manager delivered a
comprehensive workshop on these changes and how to work around them. In case
you missed it (shame on you!), here’s a run-through of what was covered.
The
Basics
These are some of the basic design and layout
updates which Facebook has implemented.
What has happened to my Page feed?!
·
The change:
This was the first change which caused many of us to scratch our heads thinking that the news feed for our
business page had simply disappeared. You used to be able to access the News Feed
for your page (as opposed to your personal profile) by switching to your page
using the dropdown menu in the top right-hand corner of the page. This would
enable you to use Facebook as your page.
·
The workaround:
Now, if you want to access your news feed,
you simply go to your business page and select “See Pages Feed” from the
options menu on the left-hand side of the screen.
Cover Photo Dimensions
·
The change:
The dimensions of your cover photo have
been changed slightly from 851x315px to 828x315px. If you’ve noticed your
header looking a little squished of late, this is why.
·
The workaround:
If your cover photo is an ordinary picture,
you probably aren’t having much of a problem- at least nothing that
repositioning it as usual won’t fix. If you have been using your business logo,
or any picture that was specifically designed to fit the original cover photo
dimensions, you might be affected. You can correct your cover photo easily in
an image editor. There’s a range of free image editing platforms online to meet
your needs- we recommend PicMonkey.com
Instant Articles
·
The change:
Instant Articles are a new feature on
Facebook. It’s an important one for publishers as it enables them to create
smart, interactive articles on Facebook. Instead of leaving the Facebook app
and loading the article in a different window, the articles can now open within
Facebook itself. This means that they have a faster loading time than before.
Videos within articles will now play automatically and photos will appear
bigger.
·
The workaround:
No workaround needed here as Instant
articles is a new feature as opposed to a change. You do need to submit a
minimum of fifty articles to be approved for this feature though, so get
writing!
Facebook Advertising: The 20% Text Rule
·
The change:
For Facebook marketers, one of the most difficult
aspects of using Facebook as an advertising medium is getting your message
across in a concise way while following all of the guidelines. Facebook has
finally made the decision to change the 20 percent ad image text overlay rule.
This change is currently being tested in the U.K and Ireland.
·
The
workaround:
To replace the original system, Facebook has
introduced four new categories to help advertisers define the level of text
overlay in their ads: OK, Low, Medium and High.
The OK category typically encompasses images with
no text other than a company logo. With a low classification, which is roughly
defined as a company logo with some text, your ad reach may be slightly
restricted. Images with a medium classification will have an even more
restricted reach, and images with high text volume won’t run. Fortunately,
there are some exceptions to this rule: Book or album covers, event posters and
product images are also won’t be penalised. Since Facebook is testing and
rolling out the new options gradually, the changes are not yet in place for all
users. You should still include as little text as possible on your images and
leave the promotional details for the actual post.
Algorithm
Changes
Here we’ll go through the slightly more complicated
algorithm changes which Facebook has recently implemented.
User Diversity
·
The change:
Facebook reports that users enjoy
reading articles from a wide range of publishers, so they have tweaked the
algorithm for greater diversity of page posts. This means it will reduce how
often people see content from one source back-to-back, or content from the same
page.
·
The workaround:
Because Facebook generally won’t
show a user several posts in a row from your page, it is now more important
than ever to space your posts out over time. This isn’t always ideal as most
businesses tend to post during business hours, but you can make use of the
“Schedule” feature to keep your posts evenly spread. You might have noticed
that you can’t schedule posts when sharing- you can get around this most of the
time by copying and pasting the link to the post you want to share and then
posting it as usual from your page’s Timeline.
There is also a good side to this
change, which is that if you have multiple platforms for your business besides
Facebook, for example websites, blogs, newsletters and so on, Facebook will be
glad to see content coming in from several different sources and you will be
more likely to reach the news feeds of your audience.
The Importance of Quality Content
·
The change
There are also some changes in how posts are picked for a user’s news
feed; Facebook wants to phase out content that isn’t meaningful or useful to
its users.
There are a few important implications of these
changes. If you run a small business, the most important thing here is probably
that ‘Like&Share’ competitions have been targeted. Facebook sees these as
spammy behaviour so these types of post will really struggle to gain position
in the news feed from here on out.
·
The
workaround
Fortunately there is a way around this,
although we’d strongly suggest brainstorming ways of promoting your business by
working with Facebook instead of
against it- it’s only going to get harder as time goes on. But if you really do
want to run campaigns such as ‘Like&Share’ competitions, it appears that
for the time being, Facebook’s main red light for detecting spammy posts are
currency symbols such as € or £. Including these symbols in your posts is
likely to damage your post reach, and annoyingly this does include cases where
you have a currency symbol in a completely ordinary, un-spammy post. Instead of
typing these, for example “Win a voucher worth €80!”, type something like “Win
a voucher worth 80EUR”. This should stop your posts being penalised for now.
·
The change:
Audience
Optimisation: Introduced in January and known as the Audience Optimization
tool, this new feature allows publishers to set preferences on each new post to
target a specific audience based on interests, demographics, and geographic
location.
This tool makes it easier for you to direct a post
to your intended audience, but there are some things to bear in mind. Most
importantly, don’t be tempted to include too many target groups. Keep it
specific- the more tags you include, the more likely you are to simply confuse
Facebook and reach nobody at all.
·
The change:
Live Video: We know
that Facebook prioritises rich media such as video in its’ news feeds, and that
it introduced a live video-streaming service late last year. It turns out that
live videos are watched three times longer than ordinary videos, so in March
Facebook tweaked the algorithm to prioritise live video in user news feeds. Facebook
previously prioritised stories that it deemed “best,” not necessarily the most
current. This live video update changes that. It also helps Facebook keep up
with Twitter’s real-time post, and to cash in on the “right-now” phenomenon that has catapulted
platforms such as Snapchat to such instant and massive popularity.
·
The
workaround:
Get filming! This is a fantastic time for small
businesses to use the live-video feature, as so far it has mainly been picked
up by bigger companies. Chances are, if you start introducing live streams now,
your followers will watch out of curiosity as they won’t have come across
Facebook Live very much yet. Any engagement you get from going live will be a
boost for your Page’s track record and will help show your followers that you
are current, exciting, and willing to go out on a limb.
As far as content is concerned, small businesses
also have a window of opportunity to stand out from the crowd and gain a loyal
following. We’ve talked previously about how much people love to get a glimpse
behind the scenes of companies (see our article on Snapchat- many of the
tactics employed in a Snapchat strategy will also work for live-streaming). Obviously
it isn’t a good idea to go Live without planning in advance- Murphy’s Law deems
this a recipe for disaster actually, but you could do a weekly spot at whatever
time your followers are most active- you can find this out from the ‘Insights”
tab of your page.
Some other things to bear in mind about Facebook
Live Video:
- As the video is shooting, you see how many people
are watching the video as well as their names and comments.
- As soon as it’s over the video is automatically
saved to your timeline.
- You can share it, tweet it, embed it in blog posts
or delete it.
- Unlike Periscope videos or Snapchat stories --
these videos are not going to disappear after 24 hours.
**Hack: Launch your “Like&Share” competitions from
a pre-announced live video! You can ask for likes, shares and mention money as
much as you want- Facebook won’t penalise this- in fact, you’ll be launching
competitions from the most desirable
platform on Facebook at the moment. So you can boost your page engagement while
sneakily promoting your page!
·
The change:
Time is of
the essence: This calls into play yet another update to the News Feed that’ll change
the prioritization of what users see in theirs. Interacting with a post
(liking, commenting, or sharing) is a good indicator for what users are
interested in. It is not the only way of gauging interest however. Users are
less likely to interact with a sad news-related post or a serious current
event, but that does not mean they do not want these stories in their News
Feeds. In lieu of an algorithm change in April, Facebook will now measure the
potential interest in a post based on the following criteria: user interest in
the creator, post-performance among other users, past content performance of
the creator, type of post the user prefers, and how recent the post is. When a
user clicks on a post or link, Facebook will measure how much time they spend
on the post, even if they don’t like, comment, or share. This will help
Facebook in its algorithm when predicting and prioritizing which posts a user
is most interested in.
The workaround:
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a quick solution
to this one, folks! All we can do is try to take advantage of all the
information we have on how Facebook works to try to keep our performances
persistent and build momentum. There is a silver lining though, in that if a
follower views or engages with your page or its’ posts, for a short time your
posts will continue to show up on that user’s feed as Facebook will have deemed
your page of interest to the user.
·
The change:
Trending: Similar to Twitter, the News Feed will now show stories about
things that are trending as soon as they occur, so the user can immediately
know what friends or favourite Pages are saying about the stories of the day. This
means that when a Page posts about something that is currently a hot topic of
conversation on Facebook, that post is more likely to gain a good position in
users’ feeds. Early testing has shown that this update on average leads to a more
than 6% increase in people engaging with these stories (e.g., more people
share, comment, like or click).
·
The workaround:
Unlike some of the other changes which can
be a little tricky to work around, the solution to this one is so obvious that
chances are you’ve already been doing it all along: All you need to do is try
and draw links between current events and your company and post about them! So
if you sell hats, for example, and the hot topic of the day is Donald Trump’s
upcoming visit to Ireland, you could take advantage of the fact that the
internet has consistently poked fun at his comb-over and post about providing
with a specially designed head covering!
….Okay, it’s probably a good idea to steer
clear of political commentary unless it’s actually relevant to your page- the
idea is to gain followers rather than alienate them. In fact, one of the
deciding factors behind this particular algorithm change was to help Facebook
steer clear of political bias after Mark Zuckerberg got into a spot of bother
with conservatives. But you get the idea. Another great facet of what’s
Trending is that small, local businesses can easily get in on the action of
trending local topics, and we know that local news, particularly good news,
tends to be very successful on Facebook. If you mentioned last week’s beautiful
weather on your Page at all, you’ve probably seen this in action quite
recently!
That’s all folks- if you’re still reading,
congratulations! There’s a lot to think about but the ever-changing landscape
of social media is the bread and butter of marketers in this day and age. Keep
an eye on our Facebook page for other news about marketing and social media as
well as upcoming workshops and events at the Centre. And (because I’m free to
mention it here!), don’t forget to like and share!
