Understanding How Facebook’s Newsfeed Works
November 23, 2017 /
When you post updates on your business’s Facebook Page, your followers will potentially see those updates in their News Feeds. Each user’s News Feed is like the front page of a personalised newspaper. It includes recent popular updates both from their personal Facebook friends and from the businesses they follow.
You may think that when you gain a new fan for your business Facebook Page that they will automatically see your posts in their timeline. In fact, they are highly unlikely to see any of your posts. Just because someone has “liked” your page doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to see your updates when they log onto Facebook. In fact, Facebook says that, on average, only a very small percentage of your fans will see any given update.
Back in 2013 Facebook began this process “Our goal is to show the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them. As part of that we want to make sure that the best quality content is being produced, surfaced and shared. Our latest update to the News Feed ranking algorithm helps ensure that the organic content people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.”
Facebook has become incredible complex, employing sophisticated algorithms to determine what is quality content. Updates that users have “liked,” shared with their friends, or commented on, will be displayed more often. In other words, the more popular the content is, the more likely your fans will see it.
That’s why your job is not only to post content regularly, but figure out what kinds of updates will get your fans to do something. The more you can inspire your fans to click “Like” on your updates, to leave comments, or to click “Share” to spread your words to their friends, the better your “reach” numbers will be. To show up in as many users’ newsfeeds as possible your content must be fresh, engaging, current and compelling. Then it becomes a cycle; the benefit of having a ‘popular’ post is that your subsequent posts will have an increased likelihood of being shown.
Not all interaction by users is considered equal. Facebook ranks each of the engagement measures with a different weighting.
On the other side, if you post low engaging content or worse content that attracts negative feedback such as the user hides the posts, hides all posts or unlikes your Page, this will have a negative impact on your future posts with a lower reach. You need to be regularly checking your engagement in Facebook’s analytics to see what is and what isn’t working.
Detail in Your Facebook Marketing Strategy How to Get Around Declining Organic Reach
Your Page strategy should detail how you are going to produce high quality content and your process for optimising for engagement and reach. Here are some tips to utilise when creating your posts:
- Make your posts timely and relevant (use Facebook Insights to see when your Fans are online)
- Build credibility and trust with your audience
- Ask yourself, “Would people share this with their friends or recommend it to others?”
- Think about, “Would my audience want to see this in their News Feeds?”
- Visual Content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media channels than non-visual content
- Ask questions with ‘true / false / yes / no’ answers
- Go LIVE – use Facebook’s Live tool as this will have more organic reach than just an image or video linked from Youtube
- Other ideas about how to generate Facebook engagement
Of course, for any important messages – you need to pay.
If you need more assistance with your Facebook strategy and understanding how to get the most out of it, you can join a group training session or have a private training scheduled with an expert in Facebook.