What Marketers Need to Do About Facebook’s New Changes
January 29, 2018 § Leave a comment

(AP Photo/Manu Fernadez)
Facebook announced significant changes to its news feed algorithm in an effort to prioritize “meaningful” person-to-person interactions among friends and family over posts from Facebook pages. These updates will make it harder for pages to be seen in news feeds. Translation: Organic reach will drop.
How low is it already? Currently Digiday reports organic reach for Facebook pages with fewer than 10,000 fans has hovered around 10 percent for some time. That means that for every 700 people who liked a business page, for example, roughly 70 people would see a post in their news feeds organically without the company having to pay for the post to appear. The latest change drags that reach down to virtually zero, bringing it more in line with what larger brands have contended with for years.
So what are marketers to do? Here are some suggestions from my Women in Digital peers, media experts and even Facebook.
Advertise. Of course. Currently only about 4% of businesses on Facebook advertise. That’s pretty shocking, isn’t it? But Facebook is still currently a low cost alternative to other forms of advertising. Use Facebook advertising for awareness and promotions.
“I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” Mark Zuckerberg said in his post about the changes. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”
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