Facebooks Announcement: What you need to know & what action needs to

Facebook has introduced a huge change to the types of posts, videos, and photos that it’s members will see most often. Instead of seeing viral videos and content from business pages, you’re going to see more of what your friends and family share as well as what your friends are engaging with.

This is something they’ve been teasing for awhile – and now it’s here and this matters to YOU if you are a publisher, marketer, or business owner.

Currently, Facebook is using signals like how many people react, comment, or share a post to determine how high they appear in the News Feed. With the new update, Facebook will also be prioritizing posts that “spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people”. They will also be prioritizing posts from friends and family over public content – which is something they have been doing anyway.

As a page, this means less of your content (including videos) is going to be prioritized in the News Feed. This will lead to a possible decrease in engagement, reach, and video watch time. This will be driven by the type of content produced. So if your page is producing multiple posts a day, you are going to want to stop that immediately.

While the official release was written as a warning, of what is to come, don’t take it lightly! It’s time to act now and change how you are posting on your page.

Here is how I recommend you take action as this is being rolled out:

Invest in Facebook Ads
Instead of posting every day or throughout the day, scale back and see if your interaction picks up
Utilize content that fosters back and forth discussion between friends
Stop scheduling posts that are moving people to your blog and instead educate directly on Facebook
Prompt to promote conversations between friends to get your content distributed to a wider audience
Use Live video as often as possible. Live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook (on average six times as many interactions as regular videos).
Invite your followers and educate them on how to use the “See First in News Feed Preference” to make sure they always see posts from their favorite pages.
If you aren’t getting comments and reactions on a regular basis, stop posting frequently until there is a better understanding of what this change will do
Avoid all engagement bait at all costs