Facebook has changed its Newsfeed, and it will decrease your audience reach. It is now moving brand posts into a secondary newsfeed which makes it difficult to engage with your followers. Keep reading to find out how to prepare your brand for this Facebook Newsfeed update.
How to Prepare for the Facebook Newsfeed Update
Facebook says that their users have expressed an interest in separating their private and public content. As a result, Mark Zuckerberg decided to separate brand posts from the newsfeed. Critics may argue the change will be good for users, but it’s detrimental to brands. Unfortunately for brands, many people may choose to avoid those posts altogether resulting in businesses seeing significant declines in post views.
1. Explore Alternative Channels
Finding ways to skip Facebook platforms to connect directly with your community is going to be a must. Email, messaging, and push notifications can be great ways to keep in contact with your community. However, the question will be: how do I get my community to adjust to these changes?
Currently, Facebook’s newsfeed makes it so that your brand posts are just another piece of content. When these changes take place, however, companies will have to develop more intimate settings to converse with their community.
Make the Change
Ask your current community for email addresses and phone numbers, all while offering something back to your readers. This could include an exclusive ebook or newsletter.
Email newsletters are the current favorite way to communicate with companies like The New Tropic and The Evergrey. Following their techniques can be a great way to get your followers to switch their method of communicating with you.
SEE ALSO: How to Make Your Email More Visible in Gmail
These local publishers choose to focus almost exclusively on a daily newsletter as a way to keep in touch with their community.
The model focuses on a daily newsletter — 25 percent of The New Tropic’s 20,000 subscribers open it each day, and as do 40 percent of The Evergrey’s 4,000 subscribers — engagement events, and social media content to share with followers. It has $1.6 million in annualized revenue right now.
They get more reaction from their newsletters because they give their community a feeling of inclusivity when they participate.
If you decide to focus more on messaging, GroundSource can help you. This site focuses on products and services that will build trust with your community.
If you want to use push notification and you publish on WordPress, then installing the OneSignal plugin can get you moving.
2. Make Social Sharing a Priority
While your publisher posts may not show up on public feeds anymore, if you’re set up for sharing then you could still end up in the public feed. Visitors to your posts can still share your posts to their page, which will then put your posts on the public feed.
If you want your posts to generate attention and shareability, you’ll need to make sure that your posts contain captivating images. You might also want to add calls-to-share and headlines that are welcoming.
When developing your posts, you want to think about your reader’s journey. This means thinking about what happens from interaction to sharing. You will need meaningful interaction with your readers before you can expect them to share your posts. Without meaningful interactions, you can’t expect to build engagement momentum.
If you let your readers say what’s on their mind, tell their story, and consequently, direct your work.
Adding a polling widget can be a great way to make sure that you have the right audience. Opinary is an excellent option for a polling widget that will get feedback on your website and make sure that your target audience is getting the experience they’re looking for.
Harken has a journalism model that can help your brand adapt.
Our unique model is called public-powered journalism.
Using Hearken’s consulting services and custom platform, our partner newsrooms:
- cultivate deep audience engagement
- create original, high-performing content
- collect valuable data, emails and insights
- generate new revenue streams through user-acquisition, advertising and underwriting
This model can help your brand to adapt to greater social sharing, which can help your Facebook business page bypass the removal of publisher posts from Facebook’s newsfeed.
3. Cultivate Facebook Groups
“Groups for Pages” was introduced by Facebook in 2017. This option has allowed publishers to create their own groups, something that used to be only for private users.
Cox says the feature came about when TheWashington Post’s digital and comment editors, Terri Rupar and Teddy Amenabar, started a group called PostThis – from The Washington Post. The group allowed reporters to speak directly to passionate readers of the paper and explain how stories came together. Cox compares this to a “digital version of letters to the editor, but with ongoing real-time discussions.”
-The Verge
If your business doesn’t already have one, it’s important to make a group today. Time is of the essence, as you’ll want to take advantage of your posts showing up in Facebook’s newsfeed to tell people about your group.
Remember that your group is not just another place for your brand content. It will need a different strategy than your brand page.
To know what to focus on in your group page, you’ll need to listen to your community. You might even want to think about developing different groups for the different audience segments in your community. However, without listening to your community, you’ll never know what you need.
You will also need to consider the fact that your Facebook group won’t manage itself. When your group is created, you’ll have to devote some of your time managing your group. This is where you will advocate your brand to your community, not just post content. So, it is important to be involved.
4. Innovate and Collaborate
You know the old saying ‘two heads are better than one’? Well, the same is true here. Collaborating with another business and sharing partnerships can reach across audience lines.
When you’re still looking for someone to collaborate with, you can also learn from others and start to emulate them. It is important if you do this to give the businesses you emulate credit for the work they’ve done.
You don’t have to wait though to find a model that allows you to compete with the change in Facebook’s newsfeed. With quick work, you can team up with other similar brands and grow your audience.
Starting with a list of the businesses you know is a great start. Add new businesses that you find to your list as you go along and take a minute to reach out to the people you think are most likely to work with you. It’s okay if you find a lot of people you want to work with too. Zelle was created to compete with Venmo and was created through a collaboration of 30 banks. Sometimes bigger groups will work for you. It just depends on your situation.
5. Adapt Your Business
Unfortunately, the smaller your business is, the more it will be affected by the changes coming to Facebook’s newsfeed. If you rely on CPM or CPC-based advertising, then you will have an incredibly hard time once the changes are put in place. This means you will have to create new revenue streams.
The great thing is that communities are typically willing to subscribe to your service if you’re open about your brand. Show people that you’re humble and transparent, and they’ll love you even more for it.
With your openness, you can even ask your readers to be investors in your brand as a temporary solution. Telling your readers that they need to subscribe to your email lists or risk your brand going out of business can get some quick movement for your business to get away from Facebook’s newsfeed and into easier to manage groups and newsletters.
If you decide to look for private financing, just remember that you need a business model that will require surplus profit. This can present its own challenges, so really think it through before traveling in that particular direction.
Final Thoughts
The changes coming to Facebook’s newsfeed is all speculative at this point, so the impact of what comes next may not be as drastic as what we’ve outlined. However, making some changes now will put you in a better position for whatever changes do end up coming your way. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by implementing these small changes. Start up your Facebook group and work on your active email list to make sure that any changes to Facebooks newsfeed don’t end up leaving you behind.
What have you heard about changes on Facebook?
