Winners and Losers with Facebook
Facebook have changed the way they decide who sees your business page and as with most changes, they’ll be winners and losers.
They’ve not ditched the whole Edgeranking thing of likes, clicks, comments and shares; altogether, those action related algorithms still play a large part in creating a popular page. However, what they have done is following extensive research, is eventually realise that we don’t all take action on posts we like. For example a nice photo of a cute cat may well be something most of us like to see on our Facebook feed but that doesn’t mean we’ll like it, comment on it or share it with our friends.
Keep Facebook interesting and relevant
This realisation is good news for those of us that attempt to keep our Facebook news feed full of interesting and news relevant to the nature of our page. While the business pages that encourage people to take an action for actions sake could well lose out.
What do I mean by action for actions sake? Well in the days of pure Edgeranking algorithms Facebook rewarded you for every click, like, comment or share that happened to your posts by allowing more of your page likers to see your page. So, for example, say you’ve run a Facebook competition where you’ve asked people to like the post and comment below for a chance to win the prize. The old rules would have meant that you’ve have been rewarded for having a lot of action on your page and your reach (the amount of people that your post has been shown to) would have increased. Or you could have a number of lead generation posts on your page that result in lots of clicks. Again, the old Edgeranking would have rewarded you for this.
The new rules basically mean that Facebook has wised up to ‘posts for action sake’ and started looking more closely at the rest of your posts in your feed. Are they relevant? Are they interesting? Are they the type of posts that people on Facebook generally like to see? Funny photos, interesting facts and general meaningful posts that matter to the people who like your page.
So those that do action for actions sake will generally see an overall drop in their audience reach, while those who post meaningful updates that our audience will enjoy will see an upsurge in audience reach. Makes sense really doesn’t it.