Commenting, Sharing and Reacting on Facebook
Over the past few weeks there have been lots of announcements about changes to Facebook and its news feed. Family and friends’ posts are pushed higher than posts from businesses and companies selling themselves and their products and services.
There have been all sorts of changes to the algorithm that determines the priority of your Facebook posts, which can be hard to keep up with. So we’ve broken some of these changes down to show what they mean for you and your business’ company page.
Commenting
Do you use click-bait as a way to get friends, family and/or other Facebook users to tag or comment on your post? It will now result in Facebook demoting your post. They want to promote relevant and meaningful engagements rather than posts that give the opposite.
Perhaps if you’re a business wanting to engage with customers (i.e. you’re asking them questions or asking them to like or comment something), you may want to use an alternative method to do this. You can do this by using videos and images in your posts to display information that you think Facebook may consider more meaningful than requesting likes and comments direct from followers, so you don’t get demoted!
Sharing
Facebook are now wanting to promote shared links publicly as well as privately. This includes sharing a link within Messenger as well as publicly, such as on the news feed.
They will also promote shared posts that create more comments and conversations over shared posts with no comments. If you share a post with your friends, and you get lots of comments, then Facebook are more likely to promote it in your friends’ news feeds. They’re more than likely to demote your post if you get little to no interaction.
Reacting
It’s a lot easier to “react” to something on Facebook: you’re simply clicking the emoji, rather than commenting or sharing. Facebook think that it’s important to keep reactions. It’s also a great way for them to determine what sort of post you or someone else is posting. If a post is positive, there will be a lot of the positive reactions; “like” “love” “haha” and “wow”. You can also tell if a post is more negative if the majority of the reactions are “sad” or “angry”. If a post is controversial, there will be a mixture of reactions! They’re a great way for Facebook to determine whether to demote or promote a post in people’s news feed!
Are these changes good or bad?
Some think they could mean people will end up spending less time on Facebook. This seems an odd move for this ad-driven business, as fewer people would be seeing the ads. If this happens, fewer ads will be shown, therefore making them more expensive.
Still confused? Pivotal offer reliable and professional Social Media Marketing services to save business owners lots of time. Keep doing what you do best, and we’ll take care of your digital marketing.
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