Self-confessed ‘social nerd’ and Perth business owner, Ming Johanson, lifts the lid on the Facebook algorithm, and explains three small things startups need to understand in order to reach a greater audience.
I am often asked by distressed clients when articles such as this article back in 2013 from Mashable which spoke about some changes or the more recent article from Time Magazine, talking about how the newsfeed “Really works”.
There is always a deep frustrated sigh that escapes my lips when I get asked this, I’m now at the stage where I can almost predict with finite accuracy when these articles are going to appear and for those of us who have been working with Social Media tools such as Facebook for the last five years. This is not new news, there is nothing ground breaking in these articles and what it does instead is provide evidence to people who don’t actually know what they’re talking about and have positioned themselves as “experts” to run around scaremongering people into buying their social media services.
So I’m sitting here exasperated and a little cranky writing a list (because people seem to like lists) about what 3 small things you should understand about the Facebook Algorithm on your side.
Good original content
I feel like when I say this, it seems like I’m stating the obvious. What I mean by good content is making original content. The amount of times when I review a Facebook page and get asked by a prospective client what they’re doing wrong, the first thing that stands out is some sort of inspirational fluff that they stole (often unwittingly and without any concept of copyright law) off someone else’s Facebook page because they couldn’t think of anything original to say. From a technical aspect the image quality is already compressed by the time it’s uploaded to someone else’s Facebook page, by you downloading it and re-uploading it the file quality drops even further and therefore wouldn’t be considered good quality.
In an app driven world there are hundreds if not thousands of apps available to create original, license free graphics, coupled with stock images that are free under the Creative Commons licence (PicsArt is a great one to start with and is free to use – if you’re anything like me with shiny object syndrome you will quickly spend money on clipart and fonts that can be purchased within the app) and there you have it! Voila! Images that are yours!
Even photos taken within your business of your staff goofing off are going to be a billion times better content that a shitty recycled meme that has someone else’s Facebook page address on it.
Posting consistently
Since Facebook first started back in 2007 in Australia the user base has grown in leaps and bounds, the launch of the iPhone and Facebook app grew this to astronomical proportions, we now have anything from 10 million – 15 million active users, just in Australia alone, which means we have a lot more noise to cut through.
Just because someone has liked your page doesn’t mean they’re going to see it, if you take the average number of friends someone has on Facebook (reported to be around 290+ people) plus the average number of pages someone has liked, you have a lot of voices all shouting at you online for attention.
Think about how often you’ll see a post from a friend, it’s almost never just once a day, so if you’re a business or a startup and your posting once a week, you’re kidding yourself if you think you’re reaching your audience. On average we will post anything from 2 to 6 times a day with the knowledge that our audience will likely only see 1 out of the 6 posts depending on the time of day they’re online, or how often they engage with related topics, or if their friends are engaging with the post.
Engaging content
A lot of what has happened in the shift to Social Media is that it is treated in the same way we would treat traditional marketing. That is to say that if you were creating an advertisement for Television, Radio or Newspaper you wouldn’t expect anyone to “reply” and it would be designed to be a piece of creative that would be “Talking At” its audience instead of having a conversation with the audience.
Social Media has created a whole new way of looking at marketing which means that you can get real time response from your audience by way of a Like or a Comment and now Facebook ‘Reactions’ and creates the most reach and value for a startup.
When you think of the end-user understand the rules for the platform. Facebook is a little bit of the selfish child in the playground, they want people to stay on their platform and don’t really play well with others (Google on the other hand uses Facebook as evidence that the people going to your website are real), so when you drive traffic to someone else’s website, understand that the user, won’t remember they saw it on your Facebook page, instead they will only remember that they saw it on Facebook, humans need at least 2 to 3 interactions before they will remember your brand and the amount of lazy marketers who “Google” (and also I suspect don’t know any better) and then share a bunch of links outside of the business brand don’t realise that they are providing absolutely no benefit except to add more noise online.
It is an art form to be able to create conversations on social media platforms that keep people engaged with your brand.
Protip. If Facebook is telling you to spend money boosting a post to reach more people, it is a good indicator of good content, Facebook will never tell you to boost something that is bad content as they want people to stay on the platform, not annoy them so much they never want to return.
About Ming Johanson
Ming is the Social Nerd and Owner of OTOTGo a company that specialises in educating small to large enterprise in the use of Social Media and Digital Marketing Platforms. Ming has been voted multiple times as a Leader of Influence in the Perth community and is a regular contributor as the Social Media Expert on 6PR Tonight as well as holding a position on the branch executive committee of the Australian Computer Society of WA.
