Posted on January 18, 2018

Facebook Newsfeed Update: What It Means For Your Business And Ours

To anyone that follows Facebook and knows a thing or two about social media marketing, hearing that the organic reach of business pages on Facebook is about to take a hit probably doesn’t come as much of a shock. To everyone else though, when you read headlines like “RIP Facebook Newsfeed For Business” I’m sure it made you sweat a bit. I’m not going to lie, even I Matt Fernandez, a well-seasoned veteran of social media marketing, had a brief moment of panic when I saw articles with those headlines. Thankfully, Glacial Multimedia has a support team at Facebook that can give us answers to the hard questions and keep us sane—did I just humblebrag about how awesome we are? Yes, yes I did. #humblebrag2018

The truth is, Facebook’s organic reach for businesses is already pretty limited and if you want to reach large swaths of people you should be spending some money on Facebook advertising efforts. Organic reach with Facebook business pages has been a topic for some time within the social media marketing community. Not even three years ago it was easily possible to reach a few hundred people organically with a post while having only a little over a thousand page likes, but in 2018 even before this announcement that has become a tall order.

When Zuckerberg dropped this bit of news, the first thing I did was reach out to our Facebook support team for a more in-depth explanation of this Newsfeed update. My immediate concern was that this could affect our advertising campaigns and hamper their reach, but I was assured that this update will only affect the organic reach of posts by business pages. They weren’t able to provide concrete numbers on how much this will decrease the organic reach for business pages—I’m pretty sure that they don’t even know what to expect—but what they told me is that we should expect to see those organic numbers go down across the board due to Facebook’s algorithms favoring content from personal pages.

There are a few ways we can counter this decrease in organic reach:

• Make a marketing push to build up your page likes –10% of 10,000 is better than 10% of 100. (10% is an arbitrary number and not a literal representation of your organic reach) We can run Facebook ad campaigns with the goal of building up your page likes.
• Spread the word about your social media – Have your social media be a part of the conversation in your business. Have some signage in your business that says “Follow us on Facebook”.
• Do more Facebook Live broadcasts – Facebook will reward more organic reach to posts that generate conversation and Live broadcasts are great conversation starters.
• Boost more posts – Increase your reach with paid efforts by “boosting” notable content on your business page regularly.
• Consistently market your services with a Facebook ad campaign – Be aggressive with a Facebook ad campaign and market your services to a highly targeted audience. Budgets for a successful Facebook campaign can be as low as $300 per month depending on your goal.

This doesn’t mean we should give up on posting, you still want to make sure your page is being updated with fresh content. The last thing you want is for someone to stumble onto your page and see that it hasn’t been updated since 2015. This will make them assume you aren’t up with the times, a dinosaur, and not the cool kind we see in the Jurassic Park films. We strive to make our organic social media content as engaging and highly shareable as possible for our clients, but getting in front of a lot of people organically on Facebook is a struggle, especially if you don’t have a large following of 10,000 or more.

What this newsfeed update ultimately means for your business is this—If you want to get the word out about something, simply posting about it on your business page will not be enough to make a notable impact. I recommend for any business that wants to get something out of their social media to utilize Facebook’s advertising tools. The good news is, you don’t need to go it alone! We have the knowledge and the experience to help you achieve your goals with social media in 2018 and beyond. #notsohumblebrag2018