At my audience development consultancy, we’re working on a dozen brands’ Facebook presences at any given time. Over the past year, despite these brands’ investment in strategic audience development, they each witnessed a clear downward trend in referrals to their site from Facebook. Digital marketing friends at other large brands reported similar observations. We all suspected that Facebook was working quietly on an algorithm change.
Finally, on January 11, Mark Zuckerberg came clean in a post on his personal Facebook page: Facebook would be shifting its priorities, implementing a renewed focus on meaningful interactions with people users care about, instead of emphasizing the posts from businesses, brands and media that have dominated the platform the past few years. It wants engaged, active use of the platform, not just passive consumption of content.
This obviously has a negative impact on brands — they can no longer rely on the same traffic numbers they’ve seen in the past from the platform. A drop in traffic means a drop in site revenue — so how do brands pivot quickly and effectively?
1. Create Quality Content
Facebook’s algorithm is placing higher value on shares and comments as indicators of "meaningful interactions." Make sure your Facebook strategy is genuinely engaging. Produce content that offers innate value (without the click), starts a conversation and facilitates community.
Viral content evokes emotions, can help people or brands look cool or informed, utilizes rich media to tell a story and/or offers something valuable (how-to content, etc.). Focus on what would make someone share or comment and build content around it. Take the Ice Bucket Challenge as a model: It used video content (rich media), often featuring celebrities (Bonus!), evoked both laughter and sympathy for the cause and offered a way to look socially connected and philanthropically involved. Typical campaigns won't reach the same level of virality as the Ice Bucket Challenge, but it's a great example of how powerful these simple components can be when used together.
2. Utilize Other Channels
As an audience development consultancy, one of our top tips to brands is to avoid reliance on a single channel. Facebook and Google in particular change their algorithm quietly and frequently, often leaving brands in a lurch. SEO and email marketing will become crucial to brand’s survival. Build a large email list, clean out inactive names, build segments around different personas and tailor your content to their individual needs.
Invest in an SEO expert — it takes unique knowledge to ensure a site is built to rank, both in terms of backend obstacles and well-constructed content. They can eliminate crawl errors, page speed and indexing issues and identify realistic keywords to rank for based on competitor and industry statistics.
Diversify your audience development efforts!
3. Engage In Pay To Play
Nothing new here. As organic Facebook traffic becomes a rarity, paid activity on the platform will become even more necessary. Not familiar with Ads Manager? Now would be a great time to start.
Facebook's cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is inevitably going to increase as a result of these algorithm changes, but the platform's tools, targeting capabilities and overall effectiveness remain unmatched. If you need to grow your audience, drive brand awareness and engagement, increase traffic, acquire app downloads or email sign-ups or boost in-store visits, Facebook ads can genuinely help. Ads Manager is consistently used across all of our clients. The targeting and testing capabilities in Ads Manager create endless marketing opportunities, and Facebook has recently made changes to ensure the platform is user-friendly.
4. Use Facebook’s Other Features
Groups are a great way to build a community around a brand. Make it authentic — moderate without being promotional. Perhaps you are launching a new product line in the wellness vertical — it benefits both the company and consumer to offer a community space around the product line. Or perhaps your brand is a forward-thinking resource for content on women's issues — offer a safe space to communicate with readers about specific issues.
A lot of brands are beginning to incorporate Facebook Messenger into their marketing strategy. It offers a new distribution channel for personalized or exclusive content, influencer engagement, product updates and customer service efforts.
With access to the application program interface (API), brands can build custom bots for their business. Some hotels and airlines assist in travel booking, The Golden State Warriors created an engaging Warriors Playoffs Assistant, and Disney lets you chat directly with Miss Piggy of The Muppets. It’s a great vehicle for brand awareness campaigns and user engagement.
Determine a customer need that can be simplified via Facebook Messenger, or get creative with an entertaining company persona. If you go this route, offer a quality user experience: Have a clear voice, tone and purpose; invest in a quality dialogue engine and integrate with your business data.
Overall, the changes to the algorithm aren’t great for business — but they’re good for users. We use the platform to stay connected to others and to maintain the relationships that are important to us. These changes should cultivate that. In the meantime, the businesses that remain nimble and adapt quickly will live on to see the next big change.
