This year Facebook announced that it’s changing the way the news feed works for its users. This will have a significant effect on businesses and the way they conduct their marketing and promotional campaigns through Facebook. This has all come after Facebook directly asked its users on an ongoing survey how they feel about the content that is shown to them on Facebook.

“As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their new feeds. People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and pages they care about, and less promotional content.” – Facebook’s official blog.

So here’s what’s changing on Facebook, along with what you can do to get your posts a better reach.

– Facebook are clamping down on the amount of promotional material that you post on Facebook.

What not to do since this change:

  • Post content that only pushes people to buy a product or install an app.
  • Post content that pushes people to enter promotions or competitions.
  • Post content that reuses the exact information used in an advert.

What to do:

  • Use more ads to push the products you are trying to promote (if people are genuinely interested, they’ll buy).
  • Don’t focus on selling on Facebook. Nobody wants to reads sales driven content over and over again (yawn).
  • Run tests through Facebook to trial which sort of post are getting the most interaction. This way you can measure the type of posts that are getting the better reach, and which posts you should carry on posting with similar content.
  • Use more visual content and link with other social platforms such as Instagram.

– Organic posts to Facebook will decrease, which means that more businesses will use Facebook advertising to promote their products.

What not to do:

  • Carry on posting content that promotes or pushes products/services. Your Facebook business page will suffer for this.

What to do:

  • Give Facebook ads a try, and maybe even carry out monthly campaigns to see which posts are bringing you the best results.

What you should do if you’re a small business with no budget for Facebook advertising?

  • Do a review of the content that you are posting at the moment. Make sure the content that you are posting will be of value to your audience e.g. make it appealing and entertaining.
  • Schedule the content you know you want to post (these get rewarded with a higher place in peoples news feeds). Not only will this be useful and regular content for your audience, but it will also save you so much time!

Use only your best content

  • Facebook wants to see successful content to make its users happy. This is so that they return to use Facebook again. Post interesting and informative content to engage your audience and tempt them to ‘do’ something while reading. For example, you could ask them to click through to your “top ten…” or visit your website to read the latest blog, or even get them commenting and ‘like’ a tip that you’ve posted that might be of value to them.

Use what you already have to get a better reach

  • If the people that already like your page are engaging with what you post, then this will get you a better reach. This will lead to you gaining more likes and more engagement on your posts. The more engagement, likes, shares, clicks your Facebook posts have the better for your business page (and hopefully for you too).

Make sure you respond

  • Whether it is good or bad, make sure you acknowledge all your likes and comments on your page. Show that you’re always available to your audience, even if it is outside working hours. Adding a human response can help your Facebook presence remarkably.

Got any questions? Why not give us a call, we’d be happy to help 01792 293 366.