Facebook is updating its algorithm, and we’re panicking about all the wrong things.
Let’s imagine, for just a moment, that Facebook is gone. No more pages or groups. No more notifications alerting you to new comments on your clever meme, or the most recently posted photo of your cousin’s dog. No more videos (close-captioned, of course), and definitely no “insights” tab cluing you into which of your highly crafted posts and curated shares garnered the most audience engagement.
Anyone else feeling a little queasy?
What will we do if our brand messaging gets buried? How will we make our potential customers aware of how awesome we are?
As communicators, and certainly as marketers, most of us have developed a dependency on Facebook over the past several years—and as the platform has grown, shifted, and evolved, we’ve had to adapt as both personal users and brand managers. The topic of adaptation entered the spotlight again in the past couple of weeks, as Facebook announced the latest round of changes to its algorithm. And I watched as my Twitter feed, populated largely with marketers and professional brand managers, erupted into chaos. What will we do if our brand messaging gets buried? How will we make our potential customers aware of how awesome we are? What do we say when the boss asks for a monthly report and the numbers have plummeted?
Since that time, there have been a few other thought pieces that accurately reflected my view on the matter. (In short: CALM DOWN.) Facebook has always made decisions based on what they feel is best for their business—and make no mistake, their business is in data-informed ad sales. The medium they use to facilitate that business is their massively popular social media platform. If users leave the platform, Facebook’s business model begins to fail. It is, therefore, in the company’s best business interest to keep their users happy, interacting, and returning to the platform regularly. Luckily, those are the very same behaviors that are in the best interest of the brands that so often depend on Facebook to increase their own reach and impact.
This particular algorithm update prioritizes content that is shared by the end user’s friends and family. The concern for brands, naturally, is that this reduces organic reach of content from business pages, in a time when brand content is shown to an ever-lowering audience percentage from the start. Here’s the thing: Nobody comes to Facebook to see brand content, and they certainly don’t come to hear a sales pitch. They come to see what their friends and families care about. The secret to good content development has always been to create something that people care enough about to share or interact with in some way.
Even as we begin to see the Facebook shift as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, the mass panic provoked by the initial announcement begs another question. Why are we so afraid of losing Facebook influence?
But as marketers, we are all too often tempted by the allure of vanity metrics including number of followers, empty likes, and high reach measurements—even if we didn’t reach the right audience. We’ve put out content for the sake of posting something on a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., even if we didn’t have anything worth saying. We’ve ignored what people really wanted to see, in favor of showing them what we wanted them to know. We have made our bed, and that bed is firmly situated in our best potential customers’ blind spots. With this new algorithm, Facebook is providing us with a short-term incentive to do what we should have been doing all along: listening to our audience, creating content that they care about, and encouraging a sense of community.
Even as we begin to see the Facebook shift as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, the mass panic provoked by the initial announcement begs another question. Why are we so afraid of losing Facebook influence?
Don’t get me wrong. Facebook has been a game-changer. It was revolutionary in its early days, and continues to be an incredible tool for marketing, communication, and sales—but believing that a single channel can make or break your brand is dangerous. Facebook is powerful, but if it disappeared tomorrow, the strongest brands among us would not go out of business. If your brand depends on another company’s web algorithms, I urge you to do some serious reflection about how to diversify your outreach and storytelling techniques.
The Great Facebook Freak-Out of 2018 was enlightening as it forced us to have difficult conversations about our content—but perhaps it should instead be sparking a greater discussion about our viability. If our brands are truly lost without Facebook, maybe the “insights” tab isn’t where we ought to be looking.