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The new Facebook algorithm will force pages to be more social

It seems that the new algorithm is penilizing post from Pages, favouring updates from friends instead. According empiric observation from Original Marins Page Manager, the organic reach of pages has been decrased by a 40%. This means that the Organic Visibility of page contents is going to be negatively affected by this new algorithm. Comparing with the previous EdgeRank, the new Facebook system has three improvement:

  1. Story Bumping. The content recency will be less important in selecting what to show on newsfeed. According to Facebook this will let to see about 70% of published story against the before 57%.
  2. Last actor.Will evaluate the last 50 more recent interaction in order to prioritize contents coming from actors which we interact with in the near past time.
  3. Chronological Ordering will order in chronological order the updates written by our closest friends.

These improvements favour organic contents coming from personal profile more than the ones published through Pages, that will be pushed to advertise their content in order to appear in the timeline.

While many social media marketers are blaming Facebook for forcing them to enter a cicle of advertisment (promoting page -> promoting contents), observing the way the new algorithm works, we can find out some guideline to rethink the Facebook Action Plan.

Facebook New Algorith

1. Interaction will be the key

The last actor feature prioritizes in timeline posts from users we interact more with. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if the post is recent or not. The more a content is “actioned” by closest friends, the more It will be highlighted on timeline. Beacuse the Cronological order has a low impact in ranking, if a user share a content and this content gains comments, like or other sharings, in theory it should never expire.

 

2. Facebook Panda

The second attention-point is related to the source. According to the interview to Lars Backtrom – News Feed Manager at Facebook – by AllThingd (“Like This if You Like Pandas! Facebook Says Publishers Shouldn’t Fret About News Feed Changes.“), It seems that Facebook will mix a lot of variables in the news feed selection. Among them the prestige of the source: according to Backtron, given a certain content, if it comes from a trusted source will be better ranked than the same content coming from a non-trusted one. This means that importing feeds from news aggregators, for example, will be less valuable than an original and direct linked content.

Another cut will be made on memes and “strategies employed by people who get distribution on Facebook“, like photos with call-to-action builded in order to get actioned by users and distribuited.

Read also: News Feed FYI: Showing More High Quality Content (Facebook.com)

3. Conent quality and real engagement

So what we can guess is that the marketing automantion and the “psichology 2.0 for dummies” will be banned from the range of strategies. Brand Pages will see reducing the organic reach against an increasing of most valuable content from closest friends.

So brands will face a big chanllenge in next months. They are going to be asked to:

  1. create original and valuable content for their audience
  2. make the content shareable and actionable in organic way, not through a direct call to action
  3. make the content to be discussed and not only liked

From a planning perspective, it means to invest much more in audience analysis. Brands will have to:

  • understand the real needs of audience (avoiding a pure sales approach)
  • find out influencers to engage and understand their social needs in order to turn them into ambassadors
  • make ambassadors posting original contents about the brand to their closest friends

Difficult to implement? Sure it is. But focusing your activities in building strong relationships, for sure you’ll achieve both the engagement needed to get the visibility and the reputation required to improve business results.

Have you already started to adjust your facebook strategy in response to the new algorithm? Will you invest more in advertising or are you searching for other solutions? 

Published in Business Networking English Social Network & Social Media

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