Yesterday Mark Zuckerburg announced that the Facebook newsfeed will be shifting to share more content from your family and friends, instead of content from brands / bloggers and business pages. Since this announcement went live I’ve seen dozens of posts from bloggers, photographers and business owners up in arms.
Facebook’s killing my community! What am I going to do? Etc etc etc. Even one of my favorite mom bloggers Baby Sideburns has an open letter to the Zuck protesting her dismay about the changes.
I’ve been working in marketing and social media my entire career and from this announcement the only thing I have to say is THANK GOD.
If you are in any type of business you’ve known for years that using Facebook’s tricky algorithm to boost your engagement is a cruel mistress. The first bloggers and businesses into the world of Facebook pages got huge, fast. People liked / shared / clicked and filled your pockets with money from sponsors and customers. Slowly but surely Facebook realized that they were missing revenue and instead of charging their users, they started charging these folks who were making money off of their FREE platform.
Next came the latest round of how to trick the system. Instead of just posting your content to boost your numbers: Post Meme’s, Post Videos, Post Gifs asking people to describe their day in a Gif response. This garbage is literally collectively lowering all of our iq.
Last month, Facebook said hey guys, this is trash, let’s stop promoting it and if you don’t we’re not going to show your trash to anyone.
Again, Thank you.
So that said, how does a blogger or a brand survive on Facebook? The same way they survived before social media became a gravy train of free ‘impressions’.
CREATE GOOD CONTENT. Build your website with SEO in mind so that readers / customers can find you. Be a good steward of your community and only share your very best work.
If you are good at what you do – people will naturally share your content giving you better, more engaged, authentic engagement. Isn’t that what we all want?
To all my blogger friends. Let’s stop trying to find a way to trick the system and bemoaning how facebook is making life harder. Let’s all just accept the challenge and BE better.
Photo Credit: Karolina from Pexels
11 Comments
Tim Gillette
January 12, 2018 at 1:53 pmGood article. I like the way you think about this. We need to stop tricking the system. The trick may work for a little while, but if your trick needs someone elses tools they can change them.
Become a creative marketing person to get traffic to your site. Not just using the easy SEO trick but doing your SEO right to bring traffic not just get you to look good in the searches.
Annie
January 12, 2018 at 4:48 pmThanks for the comment Tim! 100% yes – bloggers and businesses need to be more creative if they want to continue to succeed. Same thing we saw with SEO 5 years ago and why its so important to keep evolving.
Tanya
January 12, 2018 at 2:17 pmAnnie- I am standing and applauding you from Steamboat. Why should I be trapped by the whims of FB when I produce quality content.
Plus why do I want to waste my time watching what you ate for breakfast? I want you out playing in the mountain air not glued to your phone.
Annie
January 12, 2018 at 4:49 pmThank you Tanya!! Facebook live videos of people in cars. Those drive me CRAZY.
J. Endress
January 12, 2018 at 2:21 pmI absolutely agree. It may take longer to build an audience if you forego gimmicks, but the audience you have will be loyal and organic. Great article!
Annie
January 12, 2018 at 4:50 pmThank you!!
Carla
January 12, 2018 at 2:59 pmAnnie, great points about creating valuable content, but I also think this is basically a strategy from Facebook to sell more advertising. If they are showing more content from friends and family, they won’t show the content from a business even if the content is good, meaning that the business now have to pay for adverts in order to get their content seen.
Annie
January 12, 2018 at 4:52 pmThat is true. The trick is creating content thats good enough that people want to share it – then you don’t have to pay for it. I truly believe if businesses / brands / bloggers etc were more authentic and in tune with the needs of their customers / readers and creating content around that thought process, ‘going viral’ will be more feasible under the new update.
Dorothy Sander
January 12, 2018 at 3:28 pmI love this! Thank you for saying it. We have been held hostage by the rampant belief that social media is the way. It was when I began as well, but no more. When having 20,000 + followers nets you very little it becomes a burden, not a way to connect to new customers. It has been sitting on me for some time now, and I’ve spent less and less time trying to work it and more time on content and real connection. I have found FB groups to be very beneficial. I’m not sure how they will be impacted. Your words reinforced my gut instinct and given me the courage to move on it.
Annie
January 12, 2018 at 4:54 pmYeah Dorothy! I’m so glad to hear that. Taking a chance is the best thing you can do since at this point social media can’t really take any more away from us. I love facebook groups and thats where as a consumer I spend most of my attention when I use social media.
Sarah
January 19, 2018 at 6:28 pmHere here! I hang around in a lot of photographer circles and the gist has been largely the same. I totally get that small businesses are worried because they’re having to compete against the big guns but you’re right, if we just stuck to sharing good content in the first place then this wouldn’t have become such an issue. I, for one, plan on concentrating on my blog and the connections I already have with lots of great people. After all, word-of-mouth has always been the biggest boost for any business!