First of all, stop panicking!

This is not the first time Facebook has announced that there will be changes, and after all, this is not as rigid as traditional media. Social media has been changing and evolving constantly. As marketers we need to adapt to these changes and reap the benefits of it.

What are the changes?

Mark Zuckerberg stated that these changes will affect the News Feed and how posts are ranked depending on engagement metrics (Likes, shares, comments or CTR), where posts from friends’ engagement will have priority on their algorithm vs business pages and media that will have less or non-relevance if there is no engagement.

Facebook has decreased their organic reach in the past years down to 1 or 2% and this means it will probably be ZERO%.

So what are the possible ways around this?

Even though we don’t know exactly what these changes will be yet, we believe that now it will be a 100% pay-to-play the game, meaning that the cost of advertisement will increase drastically. So companies will need to prepare their wallets if they want to be visible on Facebook.

Working on different ad placements will become more effective as well, for instance, ads on Messenger, Audience Network, Instagram Newsfeed and Stories.

In the announcement, Zuckerberg also mentioned that “We’ve seen people interact way more around live videos”. This means only one thing, you’ll need to start doing live videos, as they will be a priority for this format of content as long as there is engagement.

Another “alternative”, is Instagram and Stories in this platform. Note that this platform still has 10 times more engagement than Facebook.

It is not the first time that these types of changes have happened on Facebook and they will keep happening. The only way moving forward to promote your business is to innovate, adapt and pay the price for advertisement.

If you have questions, drop me a message at daniel@e-media.asia