Make Facebook’s New Algorithm Change Work For You
Recently, many Facebook admins have seen a significant drop in their Total Reach. For pages that want to minimize ad budget, maximizing organic reach is vital for their Facebook strategy.
Before we get onto what happened and why, let’s go over some key terms that are used in Facebook’s new Insight analytics.
What does it really mean when Facebook tells you “300 people saw this post”?
To calculate this number, Facebook includes everyone who saw the post – this includes the people you paid for to see it (Facebook ads), the amount of people who have shared it with their friends, or the free distribution from Facebook in the news feed. The people who saw it via free distribution plus the people who shared it make up what Facebook calls “Organic Reach.” The number of people who see it because of paid advertisements are referred to as “Paid Reach.”
- Organic Reach = People who share + Free Distribution
- Paid Reach = People who saw it because of paid advertisements
- Total Reach = Organic reach + Paid reach
On December 2nd, 2013 Facebook announced that they would be putting a bigger emphasis on high quality articles while slowly pushing meme content down in the news feed.
What does that mean to many Facebook page administrators?
Many of us saw a decrease in Total Reach – specifically, Organic Reach. Facebook has been continuously improving their news feed algorithm to focus on quality content, thus raising the bar for any page on the platform. With the constant quality updates, page admins need to start delivering content that will engage with their audience and keep them interested.
What are some ways that can increase your reach instead of losing it after Facebook’s most recent algorithm change?
- Focus, focus, focus on engagement
- Study, analyze, and understand why your fans click the like button for your content
- Avoid overusing strong calls to action
- Avoid using memes
- Analyze outbound links to determine which source is the most well received
- Increase post frequency
- Test different times of day for different types of content (e.g. news stories in the morning and product promotions in the evenings).
There has been research done about the news feed update and they have come to the conclusion that the pages least impacted by the changes tend to focus on avoiding meme content, as well as avoiding frequent use of call to action.
Facebook has said stated before that the ideal way to structure your content is in a logical way that makes sense to your audience. Many page admins like to include links within the description of photos, however this is against Facebook’s general wishes.
We suggest you begin to post content in a way that will engage with your audience.
