Facebook is a user’s space to connect with their friends, family and to discover more about their interests and ideas. Hundreds and thousands of people visit Facebook every day to get updates about their peers, locality, and businesses they care about. Different kinds of content and information appeal to different groups of people. Find out how to create an effective content strategy. Therefore as a business, to make sure your customers engage with your page, you have to post relevant content. But in a time where millions of posts are shared every day, how do you make sure your post finds its way to someone who would be able to relate to it?

Check out: State Of Global Digital Platforms [Infographics]

Facebook took a step to find an answer to this question. In late 2014, they conducted a survey where millions of users shared their views on how their news feeds could be improved. The outcome of the survey suggested that people wanted to see more stories from their friends and pages they like. However, on a counter-intuitive note, most posts that people find too promotional are from pages they have liked rather than advertisements.

This new set of intelligence has encouraged Facebook to introduce new volume and quality control for promotional posts. So they recently announced to make some changes that will enhance user experience and restrict the degree of influence of non-paying content on Facebook. What does that mean for businesses? Pages with promotional creative content should expect a drastic fall in their organic distribution over time. This news should not come as a surprise because the news feed is already very cluttered.

Check out: How Facebook Algorithm Decide What Appears In Users’ Newsfeed

A note for the marketers underlying Facebook’s recent changes is, if your message feels too promotional, don’t bother publishing it in the social media stream. However, if you do want to reach more customers with a promotional message, buy an ad. All businesses want to reach their customers while it is in Facebook’s best interest to enhance the user experience. However, Facebook also places a lot of importance on businesses functioning across their platform due to revenue-generating purposes.

New built-in page features

As of late, the Facebook team has been working on building new features into pages based on people’s interaction with the pages. For some pages, messaging is more prominent whereas people mostly browse through photos and videos on some other pages. Based on studies on these levels of interaction, new tools and features are being worked on. Recently, Facebook rolled out a menu section for restaurants across their platform.

Intact Link Preview

Facebook has tweaked their algorithm to favor link posts. This left the preview of the posts intact every time anyone tried to share the post across Facebook; unless of course, a separate photograph is uploaded to complement the post. Not only are they favoring the link posts, but Facebook might also be penalizing posts made from external schedulers. The trend suggests that updates posted from third-party scheduling systems are getting lower reach when compared to links directly scheduled and/or posted through Facebook.

Save links, not contents

Facebook’s new “save” feature thrives to compensate for the site’s inability to archive content. This feature allows users to save links, videos, movies, music, etc. Note: Users can save the link or the page, but not the content itself [i.e. photos/movie/article]. It is like Pinterest within Facebook; redirecting people to source sites when they want to refer back to it.

When people have an exceptionally good or bad experience, they tend to share. This means businesses need to stimulate a positive shopping experience for users be it online, or offline. In fact, a significant portion of people uses their phones for shopping-related activities while in-store and they use Facebook 4 times the rate of any other app or search. This valuable piece of information means that businesses need to enhance the channels and make the discovery of information flow easier.

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