A Change in Facebook’s Algorithm

Today we’re going to talk about social media.  Are you using it?  If not, you’re out of the loop.  You’ve missed the boat.  You’re too far gone.  Right?  Not necessarily.  Social media has been around long enough for people to realize that it’s not going anywhere.  It’s here to stay and we should just embrace it.  My suggestion to you is that if you aren’t using social media’s advantages as a part of your business’ marketing tactics, wait about a month, maybe a year and they will completely change their entire algorithm and you will have to learn it over again anyways.

I’m talking about Facebook here and for those of you that aren’t aware yet, Facebook’s algorithm recently changed to reduce spam and link “baiting.”  With that move, your business page is now showing its content to only 1-4% of its followers.  Remember that huge push you made last year to boost your followers and to get as many likes as possible on your business page?  It wasn’t worth it.  You could look at it like, well I made a boost last year and now have 4,000 followers instead of 400, 1-4% of 4,000 is more than 1-4% of 400.  This is true.  The more followers you have, the more people are seeing your posts.  That is, if these followers are active followers.  Much like anything else involved with the web these days, quality is much more important than quantity.  I like to compare this with Google’s algorithm change some years back when they took notice to the fact that web developers were loading up on bogus back-links, purchasing hundreds, if not 1000’s of links back to their sites.  This worked at the time and developers saw their sites soar through the Google rankings -until Google changed their algorithm and suddenly, first page ranked sites were no longer in the top 25.  Fast forward and we’re dealing with this again, just in another form.

What do I do you might ask?  What we here at Simplemachine have begun to implement is the mirroring of personal pages with business pages.  Personal pages have not been affected and the amount of followers your page contains is a good indication of who might be seeing your posts. For example, the local radio show Jon and Deek on 104.9 the X started noticing a change in their post impressions. Posts that originally were being seen by thousands of people were now being seen by only hundreds.  We reached out to them after hearing their show one morning and with our suggestion, they launched a personal page to their loyal followers called the Jon and Deek Gold Club.  I’ve noticed another spark in their following and think they’ve noticed the same.  Therefore, we believe that if you maintain your business page, but post the same information on both pages, you will be attracting many more eyes to your content.  We do suggest that you also post content that is geared to each page’s following separately.  Time they are a changing, my friends.  In this digital world we now live in, change is inevitable and we might as well adapt and make the best of it.

Remember, keep things simple, and if you have any questions as it comes to web design or marketing in general, feel free to shoot me a message at sean@simplemachinedesigns.com or drop me a line at 479-286-1377.  We’re happy to be a part of the Northwest Arkansas community. 1202 NE McClain, RD. Bentonville, AR 72712.

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