WTF Facebook?!

With over 60% of Kiwis on Facebook, in business, if your audience is in this 60% then it makes sense to use Facebook as a channel for your brand. Using Facebook today is a nightmare for marketers with the algorithm changing often, the logic being hard to follow, constant competition for eyeballs with new pages being created each second and the price to advertise ratcheting up. But, it’s a necessary evil for many of us so here’s a quick snapshot of how to plan to win in 2020.

According to Facebook, they say the average user has about 1,500 stories competing to appear in their News Feed every time they log on. That’s a lot of noise and no doubt why they’re working out smarter ways to give prirority to content we all want to see.

Organic reach is now at an all time low and as we said at the start, Facebook is still an important channel but it’s harder to get eyeballs on your content now with out a plan and some money.

The Facebook algorithm now is like a cauldron of chemicals – but Ignite Visibilty report that there are four major parts to the new algorithm, which are:

• Inventory (available content)

• Signals (consideration about content)

• Predictions (considerations about person)

• Overall score

Signals are interesting, and have increased in importance. These are:

• Commenting (active)

• Sharing (active)

• Reacting (active)

• Clicking (passive)

• Watching (passive)

• Viewing/hovering (passive)

The focus now for Facebook is giving more ‘air time’ to active signals - likes, comments, and shares. You need content that gets people to ‘act’. To do that, you need it to look and feel good but most importantly, it needs to connect with your audience. We’ve said before, great content sits in the sweet spot like the filling in a macaron, it’s the soft squishy bit that you/your brand have credibility in and care about, and what your audience cares about.

Developing a content plan that factors this in is more important than ever to maximise your bang for buck in 2020, so there’s more to spend on plants in the office and developing your team!