My name is Philip Brown and I’m the owner
of Deph Digital Media. We're a small digital
marketing agency based out of Seattle, Washington.
Lovely Seattle, so if you haven't had a chance
to come out and visit us, please do that soon.
I know everyone is busy, so I want to say
thank you for taking time out of your day
to join us and hopefully there's a lot you
take out of this. At the end of the presentation
we'll have a quick opportunity for me to answer
some questions that you may have. So, let's
jump right into things.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to launch a new brand via
Facebook.
Much like Snapchat, consumers are looking
for a social website to replace Facebook.
They’ve overhauled the newsfeed and they’re
shrinking the amount of content that they
show you.
Organic reach on Facebook is DEAD.
You've probably seen headlines similar to
these and they all warn us of the Facebook
apocalypse. But what does it that really mean
for publishers like yourself?
At the core of this messaging is a simple
change to • Facebook’s algorithm.
And if you aren’t familiar with an algorithm,
for the purpose of today’s conversation
we’re going to define that as a calculated
process that controls the flow of information
in which people receive.
So when you search online, scroll through
your social feeds or receive song recommendations
from Spotify, or something like that, you
are being guided by an algorithm that understands
your consumption habits probably better than
you do.
So people tend to think that when everything
they see on their newsfeeds through Facebook,
Twitter or Instagram is relevant to them,
that it's kind of magic. But it’s not magic
at all, it’s actually mathematic and the
equation they use to determine what content
to show you is made up of two parts.
The first is algorithmic quality - the quality
standard and value of the content available.
And the second part of that equation is your
browsing history - the actions and reactions
you’ve taken to specific chunks of content
they've shown you in the past.
This means that whether by design or by some
personal choice, social media algorithms have
allowed us to create filters or these echo
chambers where all of the content that we
see if what we want to see, and it kind of
blocks and removes everything that we don't.
So in the past, social networks were largely
a place where people connected, but over time
they’ve evolved into equal parts an information
distribution platform or a news sharing platform.
A huge part of that transformation was due
to the influx of businesses that joined social
networks. There's actually an interesting
fact that more than 60 million are on Facebook
alone.
As professionals, I’m sure all of you see
the benefits social can have on your marketing
and communication strategies.
There are more than 2.2 billion people on
Facebook and 32% of them engage with brand
pages or those businesses that we just discussed
regularly.
Marketers had it quite easy, thanks to Facebook.
And then something happened.
Clickbait. Fake news. Bots. Trolls. THIS.
So, Facebook made the decision to try to turn
back the hands of time. To see if they could
get back to their roots where the purpose
of the network was to spark meaningful conversations.
And I don’t think anyone would object to
that goal, but the statement they put out
in January alarmed publishers quite a bit.
They said that they're going to:
Show less content from businesses.
Pages will see a decline in the number of
people they’re reaching.
But pages who also stay true to their efforts
to help create meaningful conversations won't
be affected.
Yet still, this was kind of a jarring announcement
for publishers to hear because our page reach
had already declined for several years.
Back in 2012, an average post would be seen
by about 16% of that page’s following. By
2016, businesses were only reaching about
2% of their audience organically.
The primary reason for this declines was Facebook’s
efforts to nudge publishers to spend more
on advertising dollars - to increase ad spend.
And since the most recent change went into
effect in January, we’ve already seen further
declines, so organic posts are now reaching
around 0.7% of your total audience.
So, is there anything you can do to combat
this? Or should you just give up? The answer
to both of those questions is YES.
We've got to give up the things that no longer
work, and take notes as we go through this
presentation today on how you can maintain
some resemblance of the reach from those golden
days. In order to do that, there are going
to be two over-arching themes.
The first is to build a community, not an
audience. You’ve got to stop thinking about
your following as potential customers and
start thinking of them as your tribe – as
a group of valued stakeholders whose reactions,
and opinions and reviews of your business
even will shape the way that you start making
decisions.
The second is to make the content that you’re
sharing conversational, not attention-grabbing.
If you succeed at starting a conversation,
you’re going get on the good side of the
algorithm, which leads to more attention in
the end.
Now, let’s take a look at what the algorithm
actually takes into consideration.
Meet Jonathan Rye. Let’s say Jonathan has
a brand page, that he’s an influencer of
some sort, and he updates his profile picture.
Whether or not his update appears in user’s
newsfeeds depends on several factors.
The average amount of time the first few initial
people Facebook showed it to spent on the
content. Did they keep scrolling past it,
or did they pause, hover their mouse over
it, or maybe even click to enlarge the photo?
Then they're going to consider whether or
not those people took time to like or comment
on the post.
And if they did comment, did other people
engage with what they said?
They're also looking at how complete is Jonathan’s
profile is. If he’s got all of the information
in each field Facebook makes available, they’re
likely to predict that his page is a real
one and not something set up with the intention
to spam people.
They’re also looking at how informative
the post is. Something like an update to your
business hours listed on your page they probably
find more relevant than sharing that you’ve
changed your cover photo for the twenty-eighth
time. They're going to prioritize the type
of updates that you're making and what they
show to your audience.
So if people shared a post, were their friends
receptive to that content as well?
These kind of the basics, but let’s look
a little closer at everything we know about
the algorithm and exactly how it works.
As I mentioned, posts are first shared to
a small percentage of users and Facebook measures
everything we went over when looking at Johnathan’s
update. And because Facebook isn’t out to
get you, these initial people that see your
content are typically your most engaged fans.
You might think that we could adapt to algorithm
changes by posting more. Theoretically, the
more we post, the more that our reach would
add up. That kind of makes sense, right? But
actually, you only want to post a maximum
of 1 or 2 posts to Facebook a day.
In a pretty lengthy experiment, Buffer - which
is a social scheduling platform - discovered
that the more pages posted to Facebook the
less reach they actually received.
So in this experiment they altered their strategy
to only one post once a day and their reach
actually increased by 330%, which is quite
amazing.
So, as many social media managers know,
and hopefully that's a lot of you joining
us today, you probably under how it’s a
consistent challenge to send out a lof of quality content
to Facebook every single week. There’s the
creation process, the copywriting, the editing,
the scheduling, the monitoring, engaging with
your community – the list goes on and on.
So when you’re trying to fill the queue with
content for sake of having a presence that
content tends to become diluted and lost in
the newsfeed.
Even though it might be quality and awesome
content to share, not every post is right
for Facebook.
We also know Facebook prioritizes posts from
family and friends over public content from
business pages and that's because they believe
that a person-to-person connection is a lot
more valuable than a person-to-page connection.
And because they don’t want fake connections
to game the algorithm, they penalize posts
that ask for likes, shares or comments.
So even though you can’t ask people to comment
or share a post in the text description itself,
you still should encourage tagging when other
users choose to do so. And you can do that
by going through and liking or reacting to
comments when people have tagged in their
friends or family. A good example of this
is why you see in a lot of content that goes
viral, if you look in the comment section,
it's mainly full of people dropping names
of those on their friend’s list. And that's
part of the reason that content is so successful,
because it's being shared, they're tagging
friends and then those friends are reacting
to it as well.
So media, in an essence, kind of works like
a ripple effect. So this is a great example
of that and how you can encourage your audience
and your tribe to interact.
But of course, even something more valuable
than tags, • is a long-form comment. Facebook
wants us to spark meaningful conversations,
so by asking questions or prompting people
to share their own experiences in your post’s
comment section, you’re adding value to
that overall.
When you think about it, at its core, this
is kind of what Facebook has always been about.
Since the beginning, they’ve asked us, “What’s
on your mind?”
We know that links are only prioritized when
they’re shared via Messenger. And the easiest
way for users to do that is through Facebook
Instant Articles, which load your off-site
data within the Facebook app, so that users
never have to leave their platform.
Studies have shown that using Instant Articles
definitely impacts reach, which in turn leads
to better results for your content. 20% more
clicks as opposed to regular links, and an
amazing 30% more shares.
The credibility and completeness of your page
is a factor in determining whether or not
your posts are shown to people.
Many of you have probably looked through Facebook’s
settings tab, but you really should dive into
those settings a bit deeper. If your page
categories don’t align with the type of
page template you have installed, for example,
that can affect your credibility on a daily
basis.
So it's important for all of you to get in
there and make sure information is completed
accurately and if it asks for a piece of importation,
that you've provided some sort of answer because
it will increase your credibility overall.
The algorithm also favors content that generates
conversations and engagements on shares.
Recently, [Facebook Insights] began showing
us the number of engagements on shares for
each of our page posts and in a minute we’ll
get into why those numbers may be more important
than even the first column, which is the number
of reactions your original post received.
So we'll come back to this. It's a very important
step.
Native content, meaning content that is generated
from Facebook itself, gets precedence over
non-native content. So, similar to how Instant
Articles perform better because they’ve
native to Facebook, they don't require person
to leave the site, that the same for photos
and videos as well.
If you take photos from the Facebook camera,
those will get precedence over ones uploaded
from your computer or camera roll. But if
you absolutely have to upload a graphic that
your design team has given you, then make
sure the photo contains no more than 20% text.
This is a rule that Facebook has implemented
and it will diminish reach the more text you
add to a photo.
So there's a great Text Overlay tool where
you can upload those graphics to check the
amount of a text on a photo contains and it’s
important to do this because the farther you
go over 20%, the fewer people your posts is
going to be shown to.
If you share a video, a Facebook live will
get precedence over those uploaded elsewhere.
And here’s another tip, under the publishing
tools tab of your page there’s a built-in
feature that connects third party simulcasting
services and cameras to Facebook Live, so
you don’t have to sacrifice the quality
of content you’re producing in order for
it to be native.
One of the reasons live video is prioritized,
naturally, is because it gets more interactions.
So, as kind of an added bonus, let’s take
a second to see how we can get the most out
of your live videos.
First of all, tell your followers when you
plan to go live. If you utilize that live
scheduling tool under the settings I just
mentioned, your fans can actually opt in to
receive a reminder about up-coming broadcast
that they hope to tune into and then it'll
send them a notification on the day of.
To make things easier on yourself, write captions
ahead of time. You can open and close the
live window several times when you’re testing
a connection or different camera angels so
having a description ready to copy and paste,
I prefer to use the Notes app on my phone,
allows a simple way for you to stay on task.
And when you’re broadcasting, remember to
ask your viewers to subscribe to get live
notifications from your page. There’s a
follow button that appears in the corner of
every broadcast that they can click to start
receiving push notifications the next time
you go live.
And even if you aren’t reading comments
while you’re broadcasting, be sure to go
back and reply to questions that might be
in the comment section afterward. That only
helps further generate the type of conversations
Facebook’s algorithm is looking for.
So let's get back to what we know about the
algorithm. We also know that engagement is
based on a points system. And this is where
I think a lot of the fun comes in and why
a lot of you have probably joined this webinar
today-
- to learn about quality content scoring.
Every time you make a post, what questions
can you ask yourself to ensure that it’s
going to be a post that the algorithm will
favor?
Let's say this is a post and you’re about
to hit the publish button. Before you do that,
ask yourself:
Does it include native images or video?
Is it a live video?
Does it include external links?
Is it clickbait?
Does it ask users to like, share or comment?
Does it include overly promotional buzz words
like free or sale?
And has the exact same post been shared before?
Answering these questions accordingly, the
green blocks meaning that those are the answers
you want to have, should give you a good indicator
of whether or not to make the post.
Now let’s take a look at some examples to
see how you guys would rank these.
In this post from Walmart, it includes video,
but it isn’t live. And while it isn’t
clickbait, it does have an external link to
this product’s page and it avoids overall
promotional language and asking people to
engage. So how did it perform? We can’t
see the post reach, because we're not an admin
on Walmart's page, but the number of likes
is a good indicator. It received 316 positive
interactions and 28 shares.
So let’s compare that to another Walmart
post. This photo looks like it was taken natively
through the Facebook camera. It isn’t a
live video, but it comes up well on all other
components of our checklist. There’s no
link, no promotional wording at all. And this
post performed exceptionally well, with more
than 3,000 positive reactions and nearly 1,500
shares. This is the impact of a non-promotional
post vs. a sales post.
Best Buy tried their hand at sharing a link
with no native images or videos and it didn’t
perform so well. Notice the small number of
94 interactions, including a lot that are
negative responses. So probably because this
post also includes a promotional phrase, promoting
people to pre-order.
On the flip side of things, Starbucks went
live, they engaged within the comment section
of their video, they avoided links and they
were able to see a lot of success with this
post encouraging people to register to vote.
Again, really highlighting the importance
of building a community, over building an
audience.
So you may be wondering, why would I make
an update without linking to my site? How
does that help me drive business? Well, social
media removes this negative association people
have of being subjected to marketing. People
scroll through social media at home, a lot
of times even while they're laying in bed
and while doing so, they’re creating a positive
association with your company.
And as it turns out, this leads to profitability.
Customers who have interacted positively with
a brand’s social media have been shown to
spend 21% more than customers who don't.
So once you’ve made your community building
post, we're going to look at some ranking
signals. These are questions that Facebook
is going to ask when determining whether or
not to distribute that post.
So your post is now part of the newsfeed and
the algorithm is asking these questions:
Is the post timely? Was it made at a peak
time when people were online to distribute
it to?
Are people who regularly engage with your
page liking the post?
Are people having a discussion in the comments
of that post?
And what is all of that engagement worth?
Well, to answer that last question, we have
something called algorithmic signals. Remember
earlier we defined an algorithm as a mathematical
calculation, so the things that are going
to signal whether or not a post is creating
meaningful interactions, are numbers - numbers
estimated by some researchers at STE Davies.
Let’s look at this post from Chipotle.
Every like or reaction that this posts receives
is going to count as 1 point.
Every comment adds 6 points, longer comments
13.
Shares are also going to be counted at 6 points
apiece, while shares that generate engagement
are bumped up to 13 points as well.
And if the post contains a video, 30 second
video views are worth ¼ of a point while
an entire minute of watch time generates you
13 points.
Here’s an important component: points can
also be subtracted. Every bit of negative
feedback, which means someone hides the post
or unfollows your page based on that post,
results in 100 points being subtracted.
It’s impossible for us to get precise calculations
for any given post you make because we don’t
know how much engagement Facebook considers
on a share to either bump that total from
6 to 13. We also don’t know their exact
definition of a long-form comment.
We can do rough calculations, but there’s
no set goal, no number that everyone should
be trying to reach. Those goals are different
for every type of page and every type of business.
And that's what a Social Media Marketers like
myself does. We download your Facebook post
insights, create a spreadsheet, and then weigh
each post to calculate your estimated engagement
score and then make suggestions based on the
type of content that’s performing well for
your audience, and those weighted factors
and what points you're assigning to the types
of engagement you find most impactful. That's
what's going to make those equations different
across the board.
So we basically analyze complicated data and
break it down to give you a simple synopsis.
So, what’s the synopsis from today? What
about that Facebook apocalypse?
After all, didn’t everyone say they were
going to delete their Facebook accounts?
Well, as it turns out they didn’t. And I
don’t think of it as an apocalypse. I think
of it as a reawakening. You’ve definitely
got to change your approach to Facebook, but
the benefits of doing so are going to lead
to more successful results and less stress
about creating content.
So, here’s what I’m hoping you take away
from this today.
Take an 80/20 approach to native and owned
content. Facebook wants you to create content
for the platform, not just post links to your
own sites. But if you have a credible profile
and do so sparingly the algorithm may actually
help you when you decide to promote those
links or your own content.
Use live video to drive engagement whenever
possible. Facebook has specifically said they
will prioritize live video because they know
it generates six times more engagement than
any other content. Anything that drives meaningful
engagement is worth doing.
Absolutely no clickbait, engagement bait or
any type of overly promotional content. Any
clickbait articles, statuses that ask users
to like, comment and share, or promotional
updates will be marked down by the Facebook
algorithm and will hurt every post you make
in the future. Don’t do it.
And don’t use Facebook as a means to share
every piece of content you have. If it doesn’t
generate engagement then your credibility
score will decrease and our aim is to be reputable
in the eyes of the algorithm. Only share content
you believe is suitable for the platform and
the audience you’re trying to engage, the
community you're trying to build. Be choosy
with what you share.
And if you’re looking for someone to help
you do that, I hope you choose Deph Digital.
