How to Use Facebook Changes to Better Your Social Media Strategy

Facebook is constantly growing, changing, and updating its various offerings for individuals and businesses. That’s why it’s important to stay up-to-date on these changes and then adapt to fit them within your social media strategy. 

At Dream Local Digital, we pay attention to industry trends and constantly adapt to changes that affect the results we achieve for our clients.

As the marketing world discusses the implications of the new algorithm announced by Facebook in early 2018, we have been working to ensure we make inline changes to keep our client brands visible. In return, we continue to help small businesses reach their online marketing goals.

How to adapt to the latest Facebook changes

Among the updates, Facebook changed how content within newsfeeds is shown to others. Newsfeeds now showcase much less public content from brands and businesses and much more content from friends, family, and groups. 

While this is great for individuals who love to only see their latest family or friend updates, it does a disservice to brands who have relied on public engagement to get their brand messaging shared or engaged with. 

As a business, you may be wondering how you can adapt to fit the latest Facebook changes within your social media strategy. Here are a few tips to incorporate into your social media strategy: 

• Encourage your followers to edit their settings so your company is one they prefer to see in their news feeds. Users now have the option to choose 30 people and/or brands they want to show up first in their news feeds. You can encourage them to choose yours to be one of those. 
• Continue to post engaging and relevant content your audience will want to learn from, engage with, and share. 
• Work harder at building your followers into email subscribers. This will help you grow your business and build relationships. Remember, you don’t own your Facebook profile — Facebook does. You do own your email list. 
• Incorporate a video marketing strategy into your social posts. Video gains the highest amount of engagement.

Don’t run from the algorithm change. Instead, analyze your current marketing strategy and make changes where appropriate. 

Are you posting the right types of content to position your business as an industry expert, engage your audience, and promote your goods and services? Are you providing your marketing team or agency with the events, specials, photographs, and videos they need in order to generate quality content? If you are not, it’s past time to start.

Remember the purpose of advertising

Facebook’s changes may drive brands crazy, but they are for good reason. Lately, Facebook has been scrutinized in the media by those who are a bit behind in the advertising and media language of today’s world. 

Remember, the average person does not get up in the morning and grab the smartphone to see what local businesses have posted and promoted since yesterday. Yet, brands were forgetting this and people became annoyed with the flood of promotions, advertisements, and retargeting that was happening. 

Make sure your brand messaging and advertising are spent in ways to better your brand and not simply to get more money from people who already are paying customers. There needs to be a fine line between interaction and sales. People want to engage on Facebook. Structure your marketing to do just that.

Working with the Facebook Social Media Management Team at Dream Local Digital

Our tactics differ depending on client goals, but one thing is the same — we have been able to reach a lot of people and target the ones most likely to benefit our clients’ businesses through Facebook. Our clients see results that improve their businesses and are able to step away from trying to keep up with the latest Facebook trends that would take up too much of their time trying to learn, test, and figure out.

Through Facebook, we:

• Claim, optimize and maintain a well-branded presence for our clients
• Post content that is relevant to the target audience, including 
  • Educational content
  • Promotional content
  • Content that positions our clients as industry experts
  • Content that showcases our client’s involvement in their local communities
  • Behind-the-scenes content
• Engage in conversations on our clients’ pages to answer questions and respond to requests

All these practices will continue to have value. The question is how to leverage them. Although organic content will reach fewer people, for many small businesses with small fan counts, this is nothing new. 

A Facebook business page with 500 fans may only have an organic reach of 35 for a recent post, which is not very helpful for a roofer trying to find which of the 40,000 homeowners in the area needs a new roof. However, there are three key factors to keep in mind when viewing this abysmal statistic.

First, people who hear about a business and then find it on Facebook will still see the business and all the great content and history it is providing. 

When friends or acquaintances talk about a business, it is common for people to search Facebook and other places to learn more. 

When this occurs, it is important that a business page is well branded, has good reviews, and has a steady stream of content showing reasons a prospect should choose to spend money with this business.

Second, fans can still follow a page and select “See First” in the “follow” window in order to see content from pages they are interested in having show up in their news feeds. 

This is something that businesses can encourage followers to do in order to stay up to date with specials, promotions, events and more.

Third, paid ads still work. While Facebook likes us all to believe it is only interested in the quality of the news feed for their patrons, this is only partially true. 

The quality of the newsfeed is critically important to Facebook, as it wants to maintain and increase users. However, Facebook is a for-profit company. It will always be interested in selling businesses the opportunity to reach all of the people on the platform. 

Currently, Facebook does an exceptional job of allowing businesses to find their target audiences through demographic, interest, website traffic, engagement, and email targeting. 

Facebook ads will become even more vital to any business on the platform. At Dream Local Digital, we will continue to incorporate paid social ads into our management for our clients and work with them to target their audience effectively through ads in order to reach their objectives.

New Tactics?

The Facebook changes will result in new tactics, recommendations, and ideas to help small businesses. Even while that occurs, it is important to realize that businesses that combine a well-branded presence with quality content, engaging conversations, and a budget will continue to have an opportunity to reach their audiences through Facebook.

These are the same tactics that historically have benefited businesses. Now it’s time to double down on them and ensure your team continues to get results.

All of this can be a lot to digest and manage as a business owner. Your primary responsibility is running your company, not staying on top of Mr. Zuckerberg’s latest announcement and changes. 

At Dream Local Digital, our client services team will guide you through strategy and tactics as well as give you the information our strategy teams need to help you succeed online and reach your audience. 

We’re here to partner with you as an extension of your business and to provide our expertise so your marketing leads to more revenue.