Who hasn’t heard about Facebook’s change to its news feed algorithm. Ok so let’s break it down. Your news feed is a personalised, ever-changing collection or updates of photos, videos, links and updates from family, friends, and businesses. (https://newsfeed.fb.com/the-stories-you-care-about?lang=en).
It’s simply your “timeline”. Facebook intends to tweak its algorithm to prioritize content from “friends, family and groups.” Now, you will be seeing less organic posts from businesses, and pages.
So we want to analyse the impact of this change on brands within the Ghanaian context. What strategies must businesses have in place to ensure that they stay relevant and reach their customers with this new algorithm tweak?
Analysing these changes from Facebook, we noticed that there will be less public content such as posts from businesses, brands, and media. These will still be seen but more prominence will be given to posts with social intentions. This now means that businesses are going to have to work harder than ever to gain their customers’ attention on the platform.
Let’s look at the strategies marketers and businesses can employ in order to stay relevant and reach their customers.
Businesses and Marketers should encourage individuals to like their pages. One thing that’s not changing about the Facebook news feed is users’ preference to see posts from their favorite Pages by choosing “See First” in their news feed preferences.
This means businesses shouldn’t be shy about asking customers to follow their page on Facebook. They could even remind loyal followers about the “See First” option.
The most common and effective method obviously is to spend more on facebook ads. Which tech giants say is the main goal for the tweak in the algorithm in order to make money.
Organic reach has been declining across social media for years. That means you already do some level of promotion with Facebook ads. But now that Facebook is reprioritising content from brands and publishers, these skills will be more important than ever. Businesses must know how to target the right audiences to ensure their advertising dollars go further.
Go back to your community and produce content that encourages meaningful one-to-many discussions. Marketers should find interesting content that compel the audience to have a voice. Community engagement is very important as well. “Provoke your audience with engaging stories”. For businesses, hiring or employing content creators will very much help to ensure consistency in creative content and will also help to get professional touch to your work.
Finally brands and businesses should take advantage of technology to boost their influence and reach. Due to the tweak in algorithm, more and more click baits to drive traffic to websites will fail. Technologies like Virtual Reality, Facebook apps etc will help publishers that lean in to more emerging forms of content and storytelling not to only win audiences, but earn more ad dollars that will be shifting away from Facebook with these recent change.
