As reported yesterday by Search Engine Watch, Facebook has decided to take a hardline on businesses that ask customers to like, comment and share specific posts. Now, most organizations consider Facebook a boon in online marketing because A) it’s FREE and B) you can reach your target audience easily. So why has Facebook decided to pump the brakes on businesses taking part in LIKE-baiting practices? Well, from the horse’s mouth…(from the Facebook Newsroom)
“Today we are announcing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would. Our update targets three broad categories of this type of feed spam behavior.”
In Facebook’s eyes, asking for likes, shares and comments means that businesses could potentially reach a very large audience without having to pay for it. According to FB research, users report that like-baiting stories are 15% less relevant than other stories that have similar likes, comments and shares.
So, how can you guard yourself from Facebook’s algorithm update? Here are a few tips:
- Don’t specifically ask for likes, comments or shares. I know this seems counter-intuitive (it’s the whole reason businesses are on FB!) but consider your audience, create genuinely good content posts and interact with users when they DO comment on your posts.
- Get the word out, but don’t over-share. We should ALL be invested in creating unique events and promos that can be shared on Facebook, but try not to overdue the promotional sharing. Pro tip: each time you plan on promoting the event, write a custom update, change the photo, update the link…
- Speaking of links, keep it relevant. Just as Google wants users to go from a search result to the EXACT content they were searching for, your FB posts should follow suit. No spamming!
Ultimately, the main goal from Facebook here is to require businesses to ‘Pay-to-Play’ – they want organizations to partake in post-promoting by utilizing the FB paid platform instead of organically grabbing attention. By eliminating spam and unwanted news feed posts, everyday users get a better overall experience. If you currently have a large FB following, you can probably expect to see a decrease in overall page impressions. Your best bet is to stay-the-course on creating unique, custom content and sharing it through your social channels.
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