InPulse Digital beats Facebook’s algorithm

What is the Facebookgeddon and how to overcome it

A few tips to improve engagement

To improve performance for our client’s social media campaigns, our Latam social media team applies our Next-Level Social Media strategy. One of its main components is to improve engagement, meaning the percentage of people who like, share, click, or recommend a post. However, Facebook keeps making things harder with its algorithm changes. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is fulfilling its goal: if you want to be relevant in the platform, you have to invest, or generate content that is original and time sensitive enough to capture the attention of a large number of users and become relevant. In other words, if you don’t pay, you have to become Facebook's algorithm’s best friend. Facebook had been announcing the changes since last year, for example, with polls asking people if they thought certain posts were advertising (especially pages with a lot of daily content that is marketing focused could become intrusive to the audience). Source A new set of changes have now been implemented.

What is different?

1)      The newsfeed is now focused even more on friends’ content and not so much on Pages. Therefore, Pages which do not focus on creating original content will not have likes or comments from friends displayed as often, affecting reach directly. 2)      Keep in mind that Facebook penalizes covert advertising posts like, “you won’t believe what happened…”, “The #5 answer will blow your mind…”, and so on. 3)      Facebook's algorithm can detect if several consecutive content is similar, meaning if we are simply copying links to direct traffic to a website, avoiding creativity, or integrating them with photos or video. With these changes, brands would apparently be doomed, however, there are ways to “beat” Facebook's algorithm and avoid being lost in the ocean of newsfeed content. The key is a carefully planned social media strategy.

How our Social Media Team Engages Consumers

Listen - my social media strategy for every brand I work for is to read and analyze the peculiarities of each community. Get to know the fan, try and interact (it is a social network after all). This is how I get to know who I’m speaking to. For example, for Canal Sony, the audience is “poplovers”: the show with the best response is Grey’s Anatomy. Combine content - love, drama, sex: poplovers. That’s the sweet spot! Go for it! Love: we achieved an organic reach of 774,000 people  Drama: this was a case of crisis management (spoiler alert!), “McDreamy” died and Canal Sony had yet to air the Grey’s Anatomy episode. We went for sarcastic and symbolic. The fans would know what we were talking about.  Sex: the reach was completely organic: Creativity- on top of knowing your community, creativity is the other key component to maximizing Facebook reach. How? For example by thinking how to integrate other pages and artists (influencers) to the copy to increase interaction, generating videos, which are ever more important for engagement, and matching them with irresistible CTAs.