If you are one of the many people confused by Facebook and its ever-changing algorithms, you’ll be pleased to know they’ve recently made some favourable changes to their operating system.
I see it everywhere – bloggers desperately trying to reach their Facebook audience, and being thwarted at every turn. Facebook has been experimenting a lot this year with delivering the best, most tailored newsfeed to its users, but at the cost of our readers seeing posts. We dedicated an entire week to decoding Facebook earlier this year – from sticking with organic reach practises to experimenting with paid ads. Both can work, but a complaint I hear often is that it’s getting to be more of a pay-to-play platform.
In both the Facebook Advertising webinar and the post we did on how to effectively target your audience, we covered the gamut of targeting options available. However, with the recent changes to targeting and tools, it is easier than ever to only show your posts to those who are interested, and to save different types of posts for different kinds of audiences.
New Facebook Tools Changes
Facebook has introduced very selective targeting options for you to really drill down and capture the right readership for your blog (or even specific posts or pages on your blog) every time you post.
Available to those who have enabled the Targeting and Privacy setting, you can now use it to provide posts to a subset of your audience.
Have a recipe post? You can now choose to show it to the part of your readership who have indicated to Facebook they like food or cooking. People who aren’t interested in that won’t see the post. But they will see a post they are interested in, based on their likes and dislikes.
Post End Date
Have a time-sensitive post? You can choose a particular date it will stop showing up in newsfeeds… but it will still be visible on your page. Again, only available to those who have enabled Targeting and Privacy, and it’s only available on desktop at the moment.
Smart Publishing
Take the guesswork out of what your audience will resonate with. Can be hard to predict, so Facebook have rolled out to a select few media organizations (for now) the ability to identify and publish stories that are already popular with the folk on Facebook.
Frequently-shared links to your website will appear in the newsfeed of people who like your page. They won’t appear on your page, but you’ll get a whole new dashboard of insights and ability to moderate comments.
Page admins can opt in from the Publisher Tools section within Page Settings.
Insights
While reasonably in-depth, your current insights will now be even more descriptive. With a better overview, you can even more effectively understand and optimize your content for success.
It’s even easier now to see where your content is going with the addition of information about people and pages that share your links.
There are also changes made to the type of insights you have access to, and how your page and plugins drive traffic to sites.
You can find out more information, and keep up with further Facebook announcements here.
So what do you think? Will this make marketing on Facebook easier for you?
Stacey is the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.net: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama (cat pictures welcome!).
Just like google,facebook also started doing such algorithm updates as well that’s why we’re loosing our fan pages audiences.Now it’s time to take care of this algorithm updates of facebook.Thanks for the share man.
You’re welcome! I think if we work with it, not against it, we can do well.
I think that people should only make a Facebook centric approach once they grow upto a certain point beyond which other tactics won’t help them. Otherwise spending money and effort on a platform like Facebook which is severely impacting our organic reach is not something I feel is good.
yeah I think it works differently for different people, depending on what outcomes they want from it. I know Darren and his team have done really well with paid reach for their Facebook pages, and it hasn’t impacted their organic reach at all. I’ve found the same.
I think it’s great that Facebook is making targeting more effective for businesses – especially those that are paying for Facebook advertising. By utilizing these new targeting options, hopefully brands will be able to see higher conversions and engagement on Facebook. We work with nonprofits and social good orgs and many clients do not have the ad budget for Facebook – However, these clients have had good luck with getting visibility to their Facebook content through visual storytelling and engaging content relevant to their niche. For tips on organic Facebook growth, we’re giving away our Facebook marketing guide.
Yes we did a great series on it a few months ago, I find lots of people are looking for effective organic reach tips. I think visual storytelling and engaging, relevant content is the first place to start.
Mark Zuckerberg will allegedly install a Facebook dislike button possibly in 2015. How do you feel about that?
I think it’s great! I’ve always wanted one. I just wish there as a “like” button for Twitter…
Stacey,
Don’t be surprised if the staff from Twitter are secretly reading this blog post and possibly adhere to your suggestion of adding a “like” button, in efforts of competing with Facebook and LinkedIn.
That’s a great post Stacey.
I have not definitely noticed these changes. The changes are far more favorable and awesome. I especially liked the concept of showing time sensitive posts for a prespecified duration. It’s great.
I also liked smart publishing.
Cheers,
Akshay ~
Me too! I think it’s great. I think the super-targeting of my audience will be the most useful for me.
i think yes, it will make it easier for me, wish you could explain step by step how to use those tools. Thanks for sharing
You can find all you need on the Facebook page I linked to.
Hi Stacey Roberts,
It’s nice that they made a change but do you really think that its gonna help bloggers ?
Well yes, I think so. The super-specific targeting is going to be great: get the most relevant information to the most relevant audience? I can’t wait to get started on that.
Facebook has been doing an incredible job with their ad system. The insight they offer are super easy to understand and give a quick and easy overlook of how effective the social media campaign is. The only bad thing they currently do (might be a bug) is that the same ad creative sometimes get rejected, which wastes some time when setting up the campaigns.
Oh I didn’t know that, that’s a bummer!
Stacey, I think these are good changes that will help with marketing on Facebook. Some of the previous changes such as limiting the organic reach of your posts seemed as if Facebook was trying to make marketing more difficult. Ultimately, it is a business so they want marketers to “pay to play”. But when marketers “pay to play”, they want great service and to see a return on investment. With the new tool changes, this provides ways to improve your marketing on Facebook and create more happy marketers which means more repeat customers. Great information.
Gosh that’s so true: when we pay to play we want good ROI. To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ve seen that much return for my investment, but others are thrilled with it.
I love my Facebook business page but I do not love the ROI I am getting advertising there vs Google. Although it is MUCH cheaper. The insight tool is very helpful..hopefully this update will be much more in depth. Thank you for sharing this!
The message the great good which will also lead you blog on Facebook. The good thing about RSS feeds are, I wonder if it will work well.