How To Keep Up With Facebook

By, Jaclyn Coleman, Public Relations Director at Muse Group

Changes to Facebook have happened AGAIN – and I’ll be the first to admit that all of the constant changes with Facebook can really be frustrating and overwhelming. However, if you can stay one step ahead, you are sure to see a steady stream of quality leads and sales.

How do you stay one step ahead of Facebook?

First thing’s First – do your research!
More and more content is being created and shared everyday. You’ve probably seen this yourself. Just a few years ago, sharing important moments experiences, articles you’ve read, photos and videos about your business was a relatively non-labor-intensive process. Today, thanks to devices like smartphones, many people can share content with just a few swipes of their finger or taps of a button.

According to Facebook: “There is now far more content being made than there is time to absorb it. On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and Page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on.” 

As a result, competition in News Feed is increasing and therefore becoming harder for any post to gain exposure. In addition to the growth in content, people are also ‘liking’ more pages.
According to Facebook: “The total number of Pages liked by the typical Facebook user grew more than 50% last year.”

Secondly – Understand how the Facebook News Feed works.
Rather than showing people all possible content, show the content that’s most relevant. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, the News Feed displays approximately 300 of them. To choose which stories to show, Facebook’s algorithm ranks each post on the quality of the content. What does the Facebook algorithm analyze? Well, the system uses over a thousand different factors such as how frequently content from a certain page is reported as low quality (i.e. people hiding a page post), how complete the page profile is and whether the fan base for a particular page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality pages.

How do we come up with this “high quality content” you ask?

You have to understand what high quality content is. Ask yourself before you post:

• Is this timely and relevant content?
• Is this content from a source you would trust?
• Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
• Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed? (I.e. asking for people to buy/like the content)

If all of this seems like too much work to put into one social platform well that’s when you hire someone to take care of it for you! Facebook can still be a very powerful tool when it is used strategically, but let’s face it; you’re too busy running your own business to keep up with the forever-changing Facebook landscape!

Let us at Muse Group take care of navigating Facebook’s evolving standards for you.