How the Latest Facebook Pages Updates Affect B2B Social Media Marketing

It’s again a case of “Facebook strikes with site updates”. The owner of your content’s rented land is making some more changes on his property. These latest Facebook Pages Updates will affect how businesses push content on the social media site to reach the news feeds of users.

Facebook has tweaked its News Feed and added some innovative paid advertising options to reach out to prospects.  This comes after feature updates banning social bribery to get page likes, killing organic reach, and cracking down on posts with clickbait headlines all in the span of 4 months. Social Media Marketers would be wise to take note of these latest tweaks as well.

Trending Topics Win

Facebook users have the option of choosing between “Top Stories” or “Most Recent” posts in their News Feed. “Most Recent” shows real-time news like twitter but users might miss crucial posts because of the volume of posts at a specific time. The alternative would be “Top Stories” which may show the posts with most engagement over say, an unpopular single-line rant by that guy who just added you yesterday.

Trending topics are more likely to show higher up in the News Feed. So Pages that post content that is related to trending topics will benefit from more engagement (likes, shares, comments) by being seen more prominently in news feeds. Initial tests have shown a 6% increase in engagement with these ‘trending’ posts.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every post drops to zero…

Another update in the News Feed algorithm takes into account the time of engagement for a post. A post that got higher engagement initially but not much later is likely to appear in news feeds only in the beginning. Very soon it will disappear from your feed if there is much less interaction.

According to Erich Owens and David Vickrey at the Facebook team, “With this update, we are going to begin looking at when people are choosing to like, comment and share.”

Bump me up, Scotty!

Facebook knows that you are not superhuman. You don’t have time to scroll down through all the posts in the news feed. There may be posts far below on your News Feed that are still getting a lot of engagement. Facebook makes it easy for you by resurfacing these posts to the top – this is the essence of bumping.

With the new changes, the timing of engagement even on these posts will be considered, i.e. bumping will also depend on the time of likes, comments and shares.

“Hide yo ads!” but “Just Give Me A Reason!” 

Facebook rolled out an update to the Custom Audience Targeting Terms early in September. Now they are also updating the way advertisers can show relevant ads on users’ news feeds by improving the feedback process after hiding ads.

• Facebook now values the reason you hide an ad.  After you hide an ad from your News Feed, you are shown a few options to explain why you hid it – whether it was irrelevant, redundant, offensive, spam or other.
• More emphasis is given to feedback from people who rarely hide ads than others who instinctively hide ads all the time. Tests revealed that there were 30% fewer ads hidden by those who did so rarely.

These updates will no doubt help Facebook show better quality ads.

What these Facebook Pages Updates mean for B2B marketers

So what do these latest Facebook Pages Updates mean for B2B marketers using social media for their businesses? The signs are still largely positive in the following ways:

1. The onus is on marketers to post content aligned to trending topics to get more interaction.
2. Bumping can ensure that your posts still make it to the top of users’ news feeds if it gains engagement later on.
3. Good quality, relevant ads can still make it to your users despite the ‘hide ads’ option.

How do these updates affect your social media marketing strategy? Do share with us in the comments below.

Read more: interactive content marketing solutions from GetIT Comms.