News & Insights

Recent Facebook Changes & How Marketers Should Respond (Nov 2014)

Recent Facebook Changes & How Marketers Should Respond (Nov 2014)

Facebook is constantly making changes - which I get have to happen. The social giant needs to keep both Facebook users, advertisers and shareholders happy. But, while change is necessary, it sure can be hard to keep up.

As marketers working on behalf of brands, we have to be aware of these changes and how they impact our marketing strategies and the positioning of the brands we represent. This post will examine some of the recent Facebook newsfeed changes and how they impact marketing efforts. Oh, and this post is packed with tons of great resources. Feel free to share!

Facebook_changes

Pay to Play

We all know that gone are the days of organic reach on Facebook. Today, it's all about pay to play. Brands need to back up their marketing strategies with budgets allocated to Facebook advertising. Facebook offers many different advertising options and the targeting can get so granular. Jon Loomer is an expert when it comes to Facebook advertising. I suggest you explore this series of posts on Facebook advertising tips and invest in Power Editor training.

Native Links

Facebook is giving more newsfeed love to brands that share native links that pull in quality images/content versus brands that upload their own images that link back to a certain page. This doesn't mean give up on creating your own large images (1200x630), but focus more on creating quality content outside Facebook and balance out when you are sharing native links and pushing your own images.

Click Baiting

Using images and cheesy copy to get people to click on posts is now frowned upon by Facebook and brands who still do this can be penalized. Amy Porterfield explains this trickery in more detail here: Should You Use Click Baiting to Increase Engagement?

Save Feature

For me, this is one of the best new features and I think we will see more brands experimenting with how they can get more users to save their content. Basically, when you see something you want to read or look into deeper, but don’t have the time, click on the gray arrow at the top right of the post and save it. You can find your saved links on the left side of your home feed (under your profile nav area). See below.

Facebook Save Feature

Facebook pushes what you have saved back into your newsfeed sporadically as reminders. This is why marketers/brands should experiment a bit. Tell your fans to save your posts – this will allow your post to get into their newsfeed more often and has more likelihood to be shared.

Video

Does it seem like your newsfeed is dominated by video lately? Facebook serves out the content you engage with most. If you play more videos, you will see more videos. If you comment on or share more images, you will see more images. We (Facebook users) are the ones training Facebook. For marketers: You want to share video content, microclips like a minute or less (if you’re good, try to keep it to :15 - think Instagram). Tip: Upload that video directly to Facebook, do not share the YouTube link…it will take users out to the YouTube app. Brands can include CTA buttons within microclips to guide fans to do exactly what they want them to do.

Atlas

This is a new ad-serving and measurement service for people-based marketing. Altas was purchased from Microsoft back in 2013 and is very similar to Google DoubleClick. Atlas allows brands to serve up display ads on Facebook and anywhere on the web based on Facebook user’s behaviors and interests and can show these ads on both desktop and mobile. You bet we will see this impact Instagram as well. Like I said, these are just some of the many changes taking place on Facebook. Changes are happening everyday. A great way to stay in the know...check Facebook's Newsfeed FYI on a regular basis.

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