Seven Things Every Event Strategist Needs to Know About The Facebook News Feed Change
Everyone has heard that Facebook is changing their News Feed algorithm and yes, it is going to impact your event and association / company pages. Now that the panic in the streets has died down, what is actually going to happen?
Good news: it’s not all doom and gloom as we initially thought.
Bad news: that super cool strategy you worked on for months might need an overhaul.
Okay, let’s get down to brass tacks. Here are the top seven things you need to know.
1. Facebook’s algorithm is going to prioritize content based on how many people react to, comment on, or share a post. Helpful Hint: Engagement will be key to working with the new algorithm.
2. Facebook also said that it will prioritize posts that spark conversations between people. Awesome, right? But Facebook continued to say that they will rank posts from friends and family higher than posts from brands. Yikes…
3. Facebook straight up said that brands will likely see their organic reach, video views, and referral traffic decrease. Double yikes…
4. Important sentence from the announcement: “Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.” Translation: Basically, if your page already has good engagement, you’ll be fine. If your page doesn’t have good engagement, it’s about to get a whole bunch worse.
5. This will probably force event strategists to really consider what they’re sharing on social media. Helpful hint: This week take a deep look at your Facebook insights/analytics. Identify the types of content you produce that have the best engagement, as well as the best days and times in your feed and use these data-points as guides in your revised strategy.
6. The announcement mentioned live video content as something valuable. Dollars to donuts, you can bet that Facebook will be prioritizing that content even more. Helpful hints: if live video (and video in general) is not part of your social media content mix, it needs to be added in ASAP. In addition, ask your viewers to turn on notifications for your videos and then choose to see your content first option. Finally, make sure to include an engagement CTA (react, comment, share...) to your video.
7. Facebook Groups were also mentioned as something that will be important moving forward. Helpful hint: If you don’t have a group set up around your event or SIGs, the time is now to get them up and humming.
While we all have a love/ hate relationship with Facebook, it’s hard to turn your back on a platform with 80 million active users. Your takeaways for the coming changes are: conversations, engagement, sharable content, groups and videos need to be front and center in your Facebook strategy… at least until the next time they decide to change the algorithm!
If you need help crushing social media for your next event, or don't know where to get started, connect with our team of digital marketing gurus to get social today.
JW Meeting Solutions is a full service meeting and event management company.
We specialize in the management of conferences and events of all shapes and sizes, across a broad spectrum of arenas; from medical, educational, business and scientific to government and association.
We’re practiced in finding solutions to any challenge to create an event experience with a difference.
Our passion is to create exceptional educational programs and meetings that engage, educate, and foster attendee affinity with the mission and vision of our partner organizations.
