Social media posting is a great way to increase your content’s reach, but what exactly should you post to engage audiences? Facebook offers plenty of options: You can link to video content on other sites like YouTube, you can share things other people on the network have already posted or you can update your status with some text. Thanks to the effects of Facebook’s most recent algorithm change, users will see the latter fade into the sunset.
Media-rich posts get more visibility
Unlike Google, which tries to be pretty upfront about how its algorithms work, Facebook doesn’t loudly advertise the math it uses to choose which posts end up on users’ News Feeds. Recently, it tweaked its system to reduce how often status updates from brands appeared to their followers, but it wasn’t clear what effect this would have. Moz was curious, and conducted a study on the visibility of brand statuses. From January to February of 2014, brands’ status updates appeared in followers’ feeds 40 percent less than they did prior the update.
It seems Facebook believes brand statuses aren’t valuable enough to be given equal News Feed weight. But what is? The same study discovered video visibility jumped by nearly 15 percent, indicating posts with videos in them will appear much more often.
Facebook wants to share interesting content
This points to Facebook’s shift toward a more visually rich system of sharing, which offers excellent content marketing guidance for those who aren’t sure how to properly manage their Facebook profiles, whether they use other social networks or not. Trying to keep followers up-to-date can be a struggle, and it’s not always clear how frequently brands should do so. However, when posts are combined with things like videos, external blog posts and images, there’s a much greater chance people will see them. These kinds of posts are also a lot more likely to increase engagement and spark conversation, which are the backbone of social media marketing.
