Facebook’s changed its magical, mystery algorithm and plunged lots of brands into headless-chicken mode as they scramble to work out how to create content that’s favoured.
Users’ newsfeeds will contain less news stories and advertising and pivot back to more content from friends and family. Obviously this will affect brands, their advertisement budget and how they create content. Facebook’s dropped some clues and revealed that brands need to work on content that creates ‘meaningful social interactions’.
But what does meaningful involve and how can your brand make sure its toeing the line?
Generate a Conversation
Instead of ‘likes’ being the dominant social currency on Facebook, the platform’s said to be concentrating more on the comments and conversation that can be generated by content. If your content proposes a question or covers a subject in a new and interesting way, hopefully your audiences will interact with your brand. Facebook are also looking for content that urges interaction between your audience – so it’s not just focusing on your brand’s conversations, but what you can encourage between others.
Try to encourage and incentivise your audience to join conversations and engage with your brand – you could highlight good comments, reward the best comments and use audience thoughts as part of user generated content to give a reason to interact.
Provide Value
Learning as much as you can about your audience and their interests and preferences is important. Then you can get to work on creating genuinely valuable content for them – whether this is instructional content to help with products and services or answering frequently asked questions.
Your customer service data can be incredibly insightful here. Use a CRM system to collect customer feedback, comments and concerns and rank and prioritise the questions and issues that frequently arise. Use this data to craft content that speaks to people’s concerns and gives them valuable instructional insight. Content like FAQs and how-to-guides can address common queries. Use a tool like TypeForm to easily collect customer feedback.
Diversify
Arguably, your content strategy should be based on generating conversation and providing value anyway. If you’re a brand that really works on providing interesting, engaging and informative content that serves a purpose for your audience – then Facebook’s algorithm changes shouldn’t affect your brand in an adverse way.
But one of the key lessons to learn from Facebook’s algorithm update and the reaction is that your brand needs to diversify, branch out onto other platforms and protect itself from further Facebook changes. The latest change shows how much brands are relying on their Facebook presence and how much power Facebook yields. We’d recommend working even more on your content strategy across platforms, diversify and basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Who knows what other changes Facebook will make in its attempt to remain relevant and draw much-needed Generation Z towards the platform to futureproof their brand. Instead of pivoting every time, protect your brand by ensuring that whatever changes Facebook makes, it won’t kill off your content strategy.
For more advice or if you’re interested in working with our team, get in touch with DOWO today.