Facebook has tweaked its news feed algorithm… again. This time, the change should benefit Page Admins by increasing engagement with their fans.
The social networking giant has been studying how people interact with status updates. They found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook from their friends, they write more status updates themselves. But that wasn’t the case with text status updates from pages.
As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends.
Facebook has realized that posts from Pages behave differently than posts from friends in the news feed. So, the company is working to improve its ranking algorithms to do a better job of differentiating between the two types.
What does this mean for Page Admins?
It means text status updates are NOT going to show up in the news feed of a page’s followers as often. You’re likely to see a decrease in reach for those type of posts. This includes status updates that feature a link to a blog article without the thumbnail image.
In my experience over the last few months, anytime I posted an update with a link to a blog article, and kept the thumbnail image in the update, it reached far fewer people than if I had kept the link, and eliminated the image. That’s why the majority of my status updates look like this:
Facebook recommends that the best way to share a link after this update will be to use a link-share, so it looks like the one below. Facebook has found that, as compared to sharing links by embedding in status updates, these posts get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds.
Well, duh! It’s been driving me crazy having to post these plain, boring text updates. We are visual creatures, and it only makes sense to include an image with an update.
I’m going to follow Facebook’s recommendation and start including images in my posts. However, I’m also going to still post plain status updates with a link too. I want to test this out for myself. I’ve been getting strange engagement rates over the last few months.
For the longest time, the consensus has been that images get the most likes, comments and shares on Facebook. That may have been true in the past. But for the last 6 months or so, I have not had that experience at all. It’s mainly been because my images get way less reach than regular status updates. That’s another reason why I haven’t been posting many images (except for infographics – they do pretty well). After all, if only a tiny fraction of my followers are even going to see the picture, what’s the point?
What do you think of this latest news feed algorithm change? Will you adjust your posts, or keep the status quo? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
