7 Tips on How to Survive the New Facebook Algorithm Update!
and excel at it!

By Konstantin Kostychuk
Founder & CEO @ MARKÉTIKA
on January 18th, 2018
Yes! Facebook is making headlines again this week!

This time it's not because of a revenge porn lawsuit in Ireland or for selling advertising space to Russia.

This time it's between Facebook and business owners.
In an announcement made in a Newsroom post by the VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri as well as a Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook users will now "see less content from businesses, brands, and media". Instead, the algorithm will now "prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people" and by people they mean friends and family.

As this announcement was made public, Mark's net worth took a $3.3-billion-dollar hit.

Why?
Because this decision will reduce the time that users spend on Facebook. That's a 180 degree turn from all of Facebook's previous efforts to keep people at their screens, including that nifty auto-play feature on all your newsfeed videos.
So how does this impact business?

1. This update will not affect the ad algorithm (for now) but organic reach will take a nose dive for pages that do not have engaging content.

2. Since the organic reach will decrease, brands will turn to advertising to get their content in front of their audience. The result? Higher cost-per-impression and cost-per-click!

3. As ad space is running low, the price of ads are increasing and organic reach is about to hit an all-time low, Influencers are the ones that have the most to win from this.

WHY?

Because they have a loyal following that continuously, in large numbers, engage and react with their content. After this Facebook update, pages with that type of audience behaviour will rise and pages with stale content will suffer.

Of course, influencers are not 100% protected. At the end of the day, influencer or not, you are at the mercy of the platform that you are using to communicate with your audience. In this case, Facebook will dictate exactly what effect the new algorithm will have on influencers using their platform.
What can you do about it?
Marketers & brands will have to step-up their marketing game (again).

1. Target your audience with amazing content. Understand what makes them tick and deliver highly engaging content that caters to different segments of your audience. If content was king before, after this update he's the emperor.

2. Use Live video. They are totalling 6 times more interactions than non-Live videos. Start using them! This is by far the easiest and quickest way to get higher engagement on your page.

3. Get VERY good at Facebook Advertising. It's about to get more competitive, costlier and also the only way that you can guarantee that your message gets to your audience.

4. Build your Facebook Messenger subscribers list. This should be a focus. If you are not familiar with what that is, Google "ManyChat", create your free account and start poking around. If email open rates are around 22%, messenger open rates are over 85%.

5. Facebook Groups is the new Live Video. Facebook is putting a lot of effort in getting brands and people to use Groups. These are mini-communities of people that share an interest in a brand, a celebrity or a hobby. If Facebook is promoting it, you should be using it.

6. Stop click or engagement baiting. Posts that say "Like this for yes, comment for no", will gradually stop working and pages that use these tactics will see a decrease in their organic reach.

7. Explore influencer marketing. This entire industry has been growing very quickly in the last few years. Influencers went from being paid $500 per collaboration to $25K and $250K! If the ROI from ads and organic content is about to decrease, ROI from influencer marketing will stay the same or increase. Which is a good thing if we're paying $100K per collaboration!
closing remarks
So what now?
At the end of the day, this new update, like all the ones before, will thin the heard of marketers fighting for business' budgets and brands that aren't committed to social media marketing. The weak and the sloppy will make space for the creative and versatile.

The client, the user and the consumer have been calling the shots for a while now. With this new update, Mark Zuckerberg wants to show the world that the focus of Facebook is still its users, their families and their friends.

One thing's for sure, all businesses will need to rethink their Facebook strategy in 2018
To put it into Mark's words, research shows that "when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being." After many years of bringing us closer to our screens, with this update, Facebook is finally making an effort to bring us closer with our family and friends. <3

But I do wonder if this announcement had anything to do with the yesterday's hearing where Congress was going to grill Alphabet, Facebook and twitter "this time for terrorist content on their sites" ;)
I hope you found this article interesting and helpful. If you have any questions, comments or rants, feel free to drop me a line at kosta@ttbagroup.com

Good luck!
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