Facebook's Recent Changes: What Do They Mean?

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged, practical advice on how to best leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer again, and welcome to another episode of social business unplugged. I always try to record these when I'm on the road. And today, I'm actually coming to you from San Antonio, Texas, where I spoke this morning to a company in the healthcare industry, on how to maximize LinkedIn for sales and for their business in general. And of all the times I've recorded this podcast, this is a first I'm actually in a car that is taking me to the airport, believe it or not. So if you hear something in the background, it's probably air conditioning, because it was like 140 crease here yesterday. But anyway, this just goes to show you that if you have a few minutes, you can record one of these podcasts or write a blog post anywhere you are in the world. But today I want to talk about the latest changes in Facebook, because if there was any one thing that set the Social Media Marketing World ablaze this week, it was Facebook's announcements about what they're doing with their news feed. And it's interesting because obviously, Facebook has been notoriously silent about how they tweak what we call the EdgeRank. Or the algorithm that decides what appears in your Facebook newsfeed. But you know what, it's no different than Google. I mean, if Google announced the exact algorithm of how they determined what gets put up on the top of Google search results, a lot of people are going to try to dupe that. So what Facebook is doing is very similar to what Google's done. And there have been a number of public announcements from Google about that they value, you know, frequent updating and fresh content and authoritative links and what have you. So in that aspect, it's really no different. And there's already people saying, Oh, is this the death of edge rank, and but you know, in all reality, what you do on Facebook, as a result of what the announcements were this week, really, honestly doesn't change. And I've already seen some blog posts, like, Oh, these are the five things you need to do to adapt to the new Facebook algorithm. And I mean, really, Facebook uses an algorithm, okay, they want you to come back to the site more, they want to expose content that they think that you will like, because you'll spend more time on the site, and therefore, they're going to sell you or they're going to be able to get more advertising revenue, because you're on the site longer or what have you. And in fact, the more you engage with content, the better they know you and the more targeted ads, they can serve you, meaning that they're going to maximize their profit as well. But taking one step back, you know, what Facebook basically says, or what they said in the recent announcement. And if you understand the way that EdgeRank works, you have that, you know, the famous triangle of time, decay, affinity and weight. Now, interestingly enough, Facebook did not say anything about weight, they did not say anything about the different types of posts. For instance, comparing a status update with a link with a photo with a video, what have you, you should know, though, that Facebook no longer is letting people or pages ask questions. And that was always actually a very, very engaging piece of content on Facebook. But, you know, perhaps the weight of the content just really isn't that important anymore. Because I don't know if you've noticed, but if you've done experiments on Facebook, recently, I find that just sending out the good old status update gets, you know, four to five times more impressions than sending out a photo or a video. And perhaps Facebook has found a nice balance that says you can send out all the photos you want. But unless people really engage with them, you're not gonna get nearly as many impressions as you get with just sending out a unique status update, which forces you to be creative and forces you to be engaging. But the notion of time decay, and the notion of affinity has always been there. So what Facebook announced they were going to do was something called Story bumping. And what story bumping is, is sometimes you just glance over posts, you don't have time you're on your mobile Facebook for 30 seconds, you glance over something, and you have to turn off your phone for whatever reason, or you have a business appointment or what have you. And what Facebook is basically saying is we think we know what posts you're gonna engage with. And we're going to make sure that you see those posts, even if you glance over them. So what they're doing is basically reintroducing these posts into your newsfeed. Really from a Facebook page managers perspective, this doesn't change anything at all, it just means that there's a greater chance that your content, if it's engaging, is going to be seen by more people. Now, I mentioned that the way we look at EdgeRank has always been this notion of time decay. So in essence, the time decay is not as important of a factor or the time decay in terms of a Facebook post, only having a few hours of life now has a bit more legs to it. What does it mean for you? Well, nothing's changed. Every Facebook post counts, you still need to create engaging content that people are going to like, comment share, and what have you. The other thing that Facebook announced was something called last actor Last actor is we're now looking at the affinity. EdgeRank always had affinity, which is what is the relationship between you and the creator of the content, whether it be a person or page. So a lost actor is basically doing instead of saying, Well, we're looking at the affinity of everybody, last actor is basically taking a defined number that says we're looking at the last 50 people or pages that you've interacted with. And based on that, that's going to sort of affect what you see. So you may have great affinity with something. But if you haven't interacted with them recently, or in the last 50 interactions, that's definitely going to affect the way that your content is being seen in the news feeds of other people. So once again, as a Facebook page manager, nothing changes, you still need to be consistently creating engaging content, I think one thing that may change, and you never know what the real objective is that Facebook has, because like Google, they're never going to share the inner workings of what they're doing. I know that with my homepage, maximize social business, as well as the pages of some others. Just about August 1, at the beginning of the month, just a few days before this announcement, we already saw that engagement was actually dropping. So perhaps this is a way of saying, Hey, friends are going to get better engagement pages aren't going to get as good of engagement, maybe it's way of pushing more and more companies to do more promoted posts to increase that last act or rank to increase the affinity with your fans. And this has been a tactic of, you know, promoting specific posts that are very engaging. It's been a tactic of social media marketers all along, maybe we're going to have to use that a little bit more now. But time will tell. And just like anything else with Facebook, the only way to find out how well you're doing is looking at analytics, whether it's Facebook Insights, whether you use something like edge rank checker, which I recommend, or recently this free tool called Komfo, that I blogged about a maximize social business that you should definitely be checking out as well, you have to have a data driven approach to social media. And therefore, don't listen to all the hype. Look at your data, the data doesn't lie, it will lead you the way. But once again, as I said, a lot of hoopla out there in the blogosphere about the Facebook changes, it is a tweak to EdgeRank. Facebook is saying EdgeRank as it is doesn't exist anymore. There's still an algorithm EdgeRank was the name of the algorithm. Maybe the algorithm doesn't have a name anymore, but there's still an algorithm that exists. And that is still going to be the battle for all of our businesses to figure out how to optimize our presence on Facebook, to be seen by more of our fans. Just like we need to optimize our websites to be seen by more people doing searches for our products and services on Google. Hey, that's it for a another edition of social business unplugged. I hope you enjoy this. In fact right now, I'm actually arriving at the San Antonio airport for my ride home. Well, I shouldn't say my ride home my airplane ride home. So it's time for me to go. Hope you enjoyed it. Appreciate all the ratings on iTunes. Once again, if there's anything you want me to cover on social business, unplug, feel free to reach out to me by email, or by just contacting me Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, check me out, maximize social business.com You'll find out where I am. Thanks again, everybody. Have a great day. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast and adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer, kneel at maximize social business.com for additional social media for business advice. Please make sure to check out your new social media for business resource at maximize social business.com Thanks again and make it a great day.