If you have been noticing that Facebook has been feeding you more of your friends’ content rather than that of Pages you follow, you are not losing your marbles. Facebook has been actively pushing the reach of Pages and brands lower down the priority list in exchange of your peers’.
The initial reason for this was because the people at Menlo Park realised that user engagement with posts have been drastically dropping of late. So in the spirit of ‘bringing people closer together and building relationships’, Facebook made post from Pages disappear almost entirely from your Newsfeed.
So here are some campaigns you can adopt for your Page to adapt to the new Facebook Order.
Increase Ads Budget
Let’s get the most crucial matter out of the bag: in order to regain your Page’s reach, you will be required to ramp up your ad Ringgit. Facebook is playing simple Supply and Demand with their limited placement slots here.
When the new algorithm dramatically reduced reach of posts by Pages, it naturally pushed more brands to increase advertising budget to compensate. As the number of placements remain constant, the increasing demand for ads by more Pages ultimately drove price of ads up. So this means that in order to reach out to your potential audiences better moving forward, you will have to increase ads budget.
Smarter Keyword Targeting
Spending all the money on advertising will not work if you don’t reach them out to the right people either. For example, marketing that stock clearance iPhone X bumper case to an Android user will greatly reduce the effectiveness as compared to an iOS user. It may still work, but not as effectively.
It really helps to create a detailed demographic and psychographic list of your target audience, and select keywords that match. That way you will not end up selling wheat to those looking for oranges.
Keep a constant watch on your ads Relevance Score, which determines how effective and relevant that ad is to your selected target audience. If it is below 6 or 7, consider tweaking your description, visual, or keywords. Having an ad with high Relevance Score can go a long way in reducing your cost.
Boosting Posts For Reach
Traditionally, brands would use Boost Posts as an alternative to running advertisements on Facebook Ads Manager. This is because it is way easier to just click the Boost button, add a budget and choose who to show the post to. Today, Boost Posts have a completely different but still very important role on Facebook.
Instead of using it as an advertisement tool, you can use it to merely prolong the lifespan of your native content. If you created a nice video on How To Pack For Your Next Adventure Travel, merely posting it will result in the video having only a lifespan of less than a day. If there is organic engagement in the form of Likes, Reactions or comments, the video may ride a longer wave, but relying on a post to go viral is like playing a game of roulette.
By Boosting the post with as little as RM5 a day allows the post to constantly reappear on your audience’s NewsFeed as long as the budget is still available.
Watch Facebook Watch
Facebook just announced Facebook Watch to the world, which is a section of the app that extracts videos from all the accounts and Pages that a person follows. This essentially brings Facebook into the YouTube game, which isn’t in itself a novel move seeing that Facebook already has a tonne of good long-form videos in its servers.
By doing so, Facebook intends to keep video-enthusiasts glued on the new video-streaming format that is more targeted to a user’s interest rather than predicting what they like and completely missing it half the time. This also means that non-video content that Pages create will not show up on Facebook Watch.
For the rest of 2018 and 2019 onwards Pages will need to put all their attention to creating videos instead of image or text posts, so their content can appear in more placements of the platform.
Study Facebook Stories
For almost a year now Facebook has been trying to emulate the success of Instagram Stories on their big blue platform, without much success. But Facebook isn’t giving up on the platform yet, because this will be the platform that solves most of Facebook’s privacy problems.
Just recently, journalists have noticed Facebook experimenting on clickable links on their Stories. We don’t yet know if this will become available to all accounts and Pages or only those who fit a certain criteria like minimum number of Followers.
As Facebook pays attention on Stories, so should brands. Most people do not know this, but Pages can post on Stories too. But before this works, you will need to first link your Instagram account to the relevant Facebook Page. Once that is done, all your Instagram stories will have an additional Facebook icon at the bottom. Clicking that will automatically share your Instagram Stories to Facebook Stories.
While the world struggles to adopt Facebook Stories, it’s a good time for us to get there first. Start by sharing all your Instagram Stories to Facebook, and eventually work on creating content that is specific to your Facebook target audience.
The Way Forward on Facebook Pages
After all of Facebook’s 2018 trials and tribulations blow over, it will still remain the largest social media platform in the world. So instead of sulking and waiting for the world to change, brands should adapt to the new ways of playing Facebook’s game.
While brands see more difficult reach of late, rest assured that Facebook will never abandon us (or our wallets, at least). This means that Facebook will always try to strike a balance of creating and maintaining a harmonious relationship between users and brands.
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