In this episode of Culture Hacks, we are talking about the New Facebook Algorithm and how you can beat it!
Make sure you listen to the episode because we lay out 5 ways that you can do this!
- Maintain your page, don’t forget about it and keep it going!
- Create great content!
- Put together Facebook Lives videos!
- Create Facebook Groups
- And Stress! It’s not the end of the world!
We will also talk about new ways next week like putting out great facebook ads to help as well, but for right now, we hope these help!
Transcript:
0:00
What’s up, and welcome to another episode of culture hacks. Today, we are going to be diving into something a little bit different, it’s not going to be Instagram today we’re talking about the brand new in today we’re talking about the brand new Facebook algorithm that a couple of weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg came out and said that it will drastically change and it’s going to affect businesses. So it’s kind of a big deal to pay attention to how many of you knew about this, how many of you knew that this actually happened, how many of you are understanding the culture what’s going on, so that you can understand it so that you can leverage it for your business. And so that’s one of the big reasons why I’ve started this culture heck series. Today, we’re talking about that.
0:44
So on July 11, so on January 11, Mark Zuckerberg came out and said, on a fairly lengthy post, but also in interviews and meetings and stuff like that said that he is going to be changing the algorithm and it’s going to affect business says and brands in a huge way. I think what Zuckerberg is wanting to do is make it a lot more social, he wants to bring it back to that social Phil. And so he said, Here, I quote where I quote him, he says, you’ll see less public content like post from businesses, brands and media and the public content, you see more will be held to the same standard, it should encourage meaningful interaction between poles, he also goes on and says, Our responsibility, like they have a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well beings as justification for the change, admitting that businesses are going to have to work harder than ever again.
1:42
And he also goes on to say that businesses are going to have to work harder in order to gain their customers attention on the platform, which is a big deal, right? That’s a huge deal. Because a lot of us sometimes we sometimes we use Facebook as a big reason why we want, or sometimes we use Facebook as a big way to push our business. Or we get most of our businesses from face business from Facebook. Or we put a lot of time and effort to gaining client attention and Facebook. And so this is going to be a huge hit for us. And so what I don’t want you all to do is I don’t want you to get discouraged because there is a way to fix it. There’s a wall, we’re not necessarily even a way to fix it. But there’s a way that you can prevent this from being a huge crutch in your business. One I would say to diversify, right? diversify where you’re putting all of your attention to because the bigger question isn’t, how can I continue to use social media or Facebook for my business?
The bigger question that you should be continuing to answer your for yourself is if Facebook or excuse me, if Facebook or whatever marketing strategy or whatever, social media network or whatever I use were to disappear tomorrow, would my business survive? Now, this isn’t even like, the crazy thing is like, this isn’t even a question that I would ask myself often. Because honestly, Facebook isn’t going anywhere. Instagram isn’t going anywhere. People always like to throw out the hypotheticals. What if this were to happen? What if Instagram were to fail? What if Instagram were just to be gone tomorrow? It’s a lot like in the 90s, a lot of people were thinking, what if this internet thing where to go away tomorrow, what if this is like, what is this internet thing, where to go away tomorrow, and it’s not going anywhere.
So just like the internet, Facebook in the immediate future is not going anywhere. So we need to learn how to leverage it right, we need to learn how to take advantage of the things that it has, so that we can continue to grow our business in this very popular platform. So some big things I want you to think about is one as you look at your in your Facebook feed is as we’re trying to learn how we can still make money. One big thing that we can work on is making sure that your Facebook feed is really
3:57
so right now what I’m gonna do is, I’m also going to give you five really practical ways for you to maintain your Facebook presence, right, I want you to be able to maintain that so that you can continue to get clients off of it. Now, for us personally, we don’t get a lot of clients from Facebook. So you’ll see us implement these things. But not very often, we’re not going to pour a whole lot of time and energy. Now, if you’re a portrait photographer, and you’re trying to reach moms, and then that’s going to be a bigger deal for you like Facebook is going to be a huge source for you. But for us, as wedding photographers, and knowing our demographic is between 25 and 35, Facebook could be good for us. But I feel like moms and like historically as we’ve done research. And as we’ve observed the social media platforms, it’s more married couples with families that are on Facebook and spending more time there, then on Instagram, whereas a lot of our clients are coming from Instagram.
So you’ll see a lot of things that we talked about, and a lot of things that we do implemented more on Instagram than Facebook. But we still adhere to these five principles. So we’re going to talk to you about those number one is making maintain, and don’t forget about your page, that’s a big deal, right? What you want to do is, even if you’re using Instagram quite a bit, you still want to maintain that Facebook page, you want to keep it clean, you want to constantly be updating your your portfolio image and your your header, like your main cover image. Because a lot of times those get a lot most more engagement than anything else, you want to keep the engagement high as high as you can. So he also says he so So Mark talked heavily about he said, post pages, making posts that people generally don’t react or comment on could see the biggest decrease in distribution pages who prompt pages whose post a prompt conversation between friends will see less of an effect.
So you want to create as much dialogue, you want to create as much action as possible. And so when you’re posting photos, even a lot of times about yourself or anything like that, then it’s going to be a big deal that’s going to draw a lot more attention to you and create a lot more of the conversation. Because people love commenting about you, especially if they know you. But you all that also means that you want to put really relevant content on Facebook, not just move your Instagram photos, and have that automatically publish to Facebook, you want to have a native content for Facebook. And one of the big things we’ll talk about later, right. And our next post is talking about that are in our next point is talking about that content. So you want to make sure that you keep so keeping up with the maintaining of your page, you want to make sure that you keep it really clean and and really really nice. So that people when they come there aren’t overwhelmed, you can also take advantage of pinning stuff to the top. So what that means is you can pick a post, you can pick a post that you really, really love.
And you can pin that post. So what we did was we took our portfolio video, because we want people to see that video. And so we took that video. And we pin that to the top of our page. So when anybody comes in, they can take a look at that video and see that first. And so maybe you want to pin maybe maybe something you want to hand if you own a stationary company is maybe your favorite things that you’ve created. Or if you own like one of the biggest things you want to pin or things you want people to see. So think about that in your business as you make your your Facebook page really clean. So continue to update and continue to put quality content and keeping it clean. So number two is continue to create great content. So talking specifically about making native content to Facebook, you don’t want to see people’s at symbols in the comments, right. Like, or on the on the caption. Like I see that all the time. And I do it. And you know, because I don’t spend as much time on Facebook. But it Facebook’s a big thing for me that I want it to be really clean. I want to actually tag people and not have it come from Instagram where I see the at symbol, right. You want to have people tagged on Facebook.
So then that’s going and pushing on to their page. And that’s generating a lot more engagement because you’re on other people’s pages now and then they’ll come to your page. So you want to ask another thing you want to do is ask really good questions. Ask good questions. Now one thing that Facebook said specifically that they’re going to cut down on is what’s called engagement bait. So I’m doing quotes called engagement bait. And that’s something that Facebook sees as when people say, comment on this if you like to eat Oreo ice cream or something like that. And that would say like that would that’s what they call engagement bait. So they he specifically says using engagement bait to goad people into commenting on posts is not meaningful interaction. And we will continue to demote those posts in newsfeed.
So just because you say whoever likes them color red comment on this post, or I went to do this, if you like this to comment on this post, you can do that as long as it leads to quality engagement and interaction. But if you just have people coming, commenting on your posts in one word, or two words, or something like that, that’s actually going to affect you more than anything. So you want to make sure that you’re asking really good questions to these people. So that they can, that creates a lot of quality engagement. And so you want also to make sure that in that, and so in that you want to make sure that it’s relevant. So in that in creating quality content, you want it to be really relevant to whatever’s going on and relevant to the post. Another thing when thinking about quality content is putting on videos that are native to the platform. So uploading videos straight to Facebook is going to be much much better than if you upload your YouTube video onto Facebook.
If that makes sense, Facebook loves native videos in there, they’re going to be seeing a lot more in videos do a lot better than photos anyway. So if you can go on and you can create any kind of slideshow or anything like that that’s going to do really well. And that’s going to create a lot of engagement so if you don’t know how to make videos try to learn how to make videos or use like Animoto if you like a slideshow. Animoto is really great; we use smart slides, there are all kinds of things that you can use to make sure that there are all kinds of things that you can use to help you to create better videos. And in turn, that’s going to help you to get a lot more engagement. So understanding that content is going to be key. Also make sure in your content that you’re tagging everybody, you can you want them to share your stuff, and you want them to see it.
And so make sure that you tag them tag your clients tag, different type of vendors, tag whatever, you can’t even tag the other like. So let’s say you work with a certain company often tag that company, you want to be seen as many places as you can and try to create a lot of engagement. And one thing that’s also getting affect your gate engagement is if you maybe write a little infographic for people that they come to your and this is maybe this is what you pin when somebody likes your page, they can also click a little drop down that says see first. So it will allow them it would allow your posts to be able to be seen first when they scroll through their feed. And so it helps you to be prioritized in their feed. Which is really really cool as well. Step number three. So we have number one, maintaining your maintain.
And don’t forget about your Facebook page number to create good content. Number three is make more live videos. This is a huge thing. Facebook is pushing across all platforms. So Instagram, Facebook, they’re trying to make sure that live is prioritized, right? So make sure that you’re going on and creating live videos. And the great thing about live videos is honestly the the biggest thing about live videos is that it immediately puts you into that person’s pocket. And it shows up on their phone. A lot of times, you probably see when somebody goes live, there’s a notification for even though you didn’t sign up for notifications for that page. So if you can be the person that they’re getting notifications for, then they’re constantly going to be reminded of you. And also the one of the other big things that that that works so well is because if they’re getting notifications for you, then that’s building brand awareness, it says that you need to see somebody at least or they need to a client potential client needs to see your brand at least seven times for them to remember it.
So the more you can, they can be notified about what you’re doing. And the more that they can create authentic engagement, then that’s going to build brand awareness for you. And so facebook live videos are big deal, even if you want to get on and talk about your day. Or talk about what kind of software you use or talk about the behind the scenes of how you print things, or how you put things together. People love seeing that stuff. And so just having the Facebook Live is not just not just about the content that you say in the video, although the better the bed. So the better the content is, the better it’s going to be for you. But it’s also about building that brand awareness when people see you going live because it’s prioritized in feeds.
So make sure that you guys are going live and make sure that you’re doing that we don’t do as much Facebook Live just because that’s not the market that we’re in right now we’re enjoying, we use Instagram. And so you’ll see us periodically go live with Instagram and take advantage of that. Number four would be to create Facebook groups. So Facebook is really is really trying to make a big deal on creating a lot of creating a lot of Facebook is trying to really make it a big deal. Facebook is really trying to make it a lot more of a social networking platform. And so these groups are really helpful like Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg when he came on.
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And he announced that this is what was going to happen his stock took a 4.5% drop, which is a big deal. 4.5% drop is not a light thing is nothing to blink at. That is a huge drop on the stock market. And so for him to know that that was going to happen and still go with this plan means that he’s serious about making this a social platform. And so for you the one of the big things that’s going to help you is to create a group groups, groups have a lot more engagement with them. And so and so I don’t know what that’s gonna look like for you and your business and what you do.
But I will try to figure out a way to take advantage of these groups, we have a group for our brides. And it’s really, really awesome, they see a lot of our content, and they can push it out for us. But you can also create a group for people who are interested in learning more about what you do. So it could be like, hey, join my group. And I’m going to give some really awesome DIY content, do some really awesome DIY tips on how to do this, this and that that can be really helpful because the engagement level is far higher in groups than it is just on a feed. So try to invite people to groups try to create these things so that people can constantly see your content. Like I see all the time, Catherine has an all kinds of groups. And so I’m getting notifications when people posting these groups all of the time. And that’s what you want to do take advantage of the groups feature,
14:42
Facebook puts it out there, they want you to create groups for a reason. And so it makes it a lot difficult. Unless you’re an influencer in Facebook, it’s going to make it a lot more difficult for you to reach your target clients. And so you’ll see that influencers are going to be they’re going to cost a little bit more there, you’re really gonna have to pay to play unless you have unless you’re in a group. Like if you want people to see your content.
Number five thing I would say is, don’t stress about it. Honestly, don’t stress about it. Don’t worry about likes, likes, or just a vanity metric right there just a metric that shows that makes you feel better about yourself. When people like the photos just because people aren’t liking your photos doesn’t mean they aren’t seeing them. Right. That’s a huge difference. That’s a huge thing to understand. And realize that people could still be seeing and you could still be engaging, they’re just not liking your photos.
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That doesn’t mean you’re not building brand awareness. That doesn’t mean people aren’t seeing you. That doesn’t mean your business is going to fail, be confident. But also understand that there are things that you can do, just don’t stress about it, don’t worry about it. Because ultimately it comes down to the bigger question. Are there other things that you could do or other things that you’re doing in your business, bringing you potential clients or bringing you customers because you don’t want your your eggs in one basket? You don’t want this hypothetical question to loom over your head.
If Facebook were to crash or fail or to be gone when my business be as well, you want to make sure that you are doing things that are setting you up for success, and really diversifying where your leads come from. It’s a huge deal. So I hope this was helpful. I hope that you guys are understanding more and more about the culture and what’s going on in it. And I hope that you guys are seeing the importance of knowing that stuff as well. Because things happen all the time on social media, and you want to be prepared for it. You want to make sure that no matter what nobody else affects your business, but you only you can affect your business and you work hard on your business, right. And so you don’t want anybody else coming in. And really the because the decisions they make, that means you have to dictate your life and your decisions off of theirs.
So make sure that you guys are working hard. Make sure you’re building your business and the way that you want to. And we’re really really excited to hear about it. So if this was helpful for you, please make sure that you pay pass this along. Make sure that you share it make sure you tell people about it. And as always screenshot you saying you’re listening to this, we would love to say hey to you out there. We would love to make sure that we see that you’re listening, interact with you.
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