First , I’m no social media expert, so take everything I say as just first hand experience being part of the managers of our Facebook page, and having friends in the the industry who manage some of the most followed pages locally.
I’ll take that again. First, I’m a social media expert. I’m part of a new group of clever beings that have a bit more time for Facebook than your average guy, and spend a bit more time reading stuff about Reach, Organic vs Paid, Virality, Post Lifespan and other such terms on the internet because we know how intelligent it makes us sound when we write articles like this one. Lately, we’ve been telling anyone that cares to listen that Facebook is evil. It is. We believe and we’re spreading word religiously that Facebook investors demand dollar results, so Zuckerberg is tweaking the algorithms that determine your content visibility with only one thing in mind: to squeeze more immediate dollars out of you. How else can we explain our failures to achieve more?
Sorry, I’ll take that again one last time. I’m no social media expert. Not by a long shot. But I’m sick of all the complaining and excuses from fellow non-experts.
Facebook is not some evil corporation only bent on squeezing immediate dollars out of you. Not any more evil than, at least Google, Microsoft, Twitter and all those other internet giants out there. Yes, they are out to make money. That’s how capitalism works and that’s how they can sustain this product you love so much. But sustaining it is not just about making that money. Facebook would be the most foolish internet company to not balance money making with product usefulness and experience for ordinary users who don’t spend their day trying to game their page posts into news feeds.
If your posts aren’t making it to people’s news feeds, well, use all that energy you are wasting on capitalism conspiracy theories to actually spend more time understanding how Facebook determines what goes into a news feed. And no, it’s just paid stuff that does. Even your experience has shown you that!
Internet platform algorithm change all the time. Live with it.
Google does this algorithm tweaking all the time too. They do it to make sure their users experience the best search product on the market. Constant change is the pace of the internet. Stop complaining that Facebook keeps changing their algorithm. if you still want your content to show to the right audience, learn what new things Facebook considers important and go along. Test some posts out, measure the results. Learn the new.
It actually doesn’t change much at all. It’s always been about great content
People engage with the content that matches more to what they are looking for on the internet. Or what appeals to them naturally. If you produce that kind of content, people will like it, share their views as comments, and re-share the post with their friends. Facebook is happier when its ordinary users are finding Facebook useful in connecting them to great content and people.
If your content is not working, it’s not being seen or re-shared, maybe there’s something wrong with your content (great content to you, may not be so great to your audience), or maybe it’s being shared when the majority of your potential likers are not on logged in, or some other reason that has little to do with paying for visibility. Paying is just so you can reach even more people, and even Facebook itself only advises that you do paid promotion of content if the update is performing well organically.
If you’re gaming the system, the algorithms will always catch up with you
And don’t go crying about capitalist evils when they do. If you’re not producing great content and resorting rather to gaming the system in whatever way. And this ranges all the way from shady stuff like buying likes to what might seem OK like giving away stuff as incentive for people to reshare otherwise lousy content. Remember if content is not great enough for people to like it naturally…
Become a real expert. Learn Facebook
It’s amazing how so many people complain about Facebook and yet when you ask them about basic questions that an ordinary person is curious about, all they have are ordinary response that betray their lack of intimate knowledge of how Facebook works. Stop the nonsense already. Earn that social media expert (well, Facebook in this case) title by actually devoting lots of time to learn how the platform works. Be an expert so much you can almost predict how an update (or page) will perform given a set of parameters like time of post, number of fans online, type of post etc…
If you’re not ready to put in what it takes to understand something, stop the complaining and look for something that you’re passionate about to be expert in.
image via trendingdig.com
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10 comments
That’s why you’re there Techzim, to TEACH US these algorithms and help us get more out of Facebook for our brands and businesses, since you have more time to study it than we do
1. Whenever I see an article by Mr Soul, I make sure to read it, and this one is even more interesting, coz I love my social media, that said lets go:
Interesting read, and people want to blame the owners of Facebook for changing their product, when the best they must do is keep up with the changes, but there are some basics, like you rightly said, that will always get you up there: Creating great/relevant content, Posting at different times of the days, coz it all boils down to Reach, everything else you can measure on facebook depends on the reach, and we also need to understand the different types of reach, esp these two: Post Reach and Page Reach, and decide which one is more important, remember its possible to have a very low post reach but a high page reach, or even a very high post reach a low page reach, understand these two
After Reach, engagement is also very important, dont just aim at reaching many people, as the lower the engagement, the more your reach is likey to drop, so make sure you post content that is important to your audience so they intract with it, if your page has high engagement, your reach will not drop
And finnaly, dont write off paying for increasing your reach, honeslty if you spend 5 months working on a product, there is every reason to pay a $100 to make sure you reach the tagret audience you had in mind while developing it.
Got a lot to share, maybe I should just write an article on Facebook, Reach, Engagement, likes, comments, clicks and negative feedback
Writing an article about cyber-bullying is not blaming facebook algorithms for social media failures. There is a BIG difference.
Hahaha, like I said, its THEIR product, if you dont like their rules switch to others, isnt Google doing the same, or are they acting like a not-for-profit?
I’m lost.
too long to read
Or maybe we can actually blame Facebook for the crisis, as this study suggests. http://goo.gl/TTC1yK
If you are into FB marketing, you’ll realise that most pages that had a high engangement were affected very little, whilst those that relied on gaming the rukles were the most affected, so it wholly depends on the quality of your posts and your efforts toward meaningful engangement
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2014/03/06/the-approaching-demise-of-organic-reach-in-facebook/
Some interesting advice here if you want to learn – it certainly not exhaustive but will give you some insight
Exactly what challenge posted. I’ve already given Facebook $20000 in advertising & my business is only a year old. I have 70k fans & the algorithm cut my reach by 75%. Even with paid ads now my reach is still cut. To spend $100 to boost a post only to watch 1,000 more people see it is a waste of money. My content & photos are great. I sell out of everything, that is until they made the change. My sales hAve dropped in half! It would be nice if I knew how to spend money to get the results I had before, but I don’t. What the magic #??!! $500 per post. $1000?? I’m not flushed with cash as a small business.