How to Adjust Your Digital Marketing Strategy on Facebook to be in Tandem with the Latest Algorithm Change

By Selina Jenkins, SEOServiceUSA

Let us dive in and get straight to the point of how you stand to lose out on getting clients and converting them to purchase the service or product that you have on offer if you do not adjust to Facebook’s latest algorithm change. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of the issue, let us first get a grip on the word digital marketing and the attendant strategies with respect to the social media platform Facebook.Digital Marketing is a term which means the marketing of goods or services by the use of digital technologies. The technologies involved cover the world wide web (Internet), mobile telephones, display advertising and any other medium which employs binary digits(bits) to function.  The explosion in digital devices over the past couple of years has led to the rise of this marketing strategy mainly due to its ability to be very targeted and measurable, down to the last detail.

Contextual Advertising

Facebook marketing is a form of digital marketing which falls under the category of search engine marketing. In this case, special codes served from Facebook’s ad servers places contextual adverts on the Facebook pages that you browse on. The word contextual simply means that the bots scan your page to determine which adverts to serve you, relevant to the content that you are viewing.I am sure you might have been shocked(or continue to be shocked) at how if you visit a page that is talking about, say, mobile phones, you notice that all the adverts on the page start showing you deals and discounts that are relevant to the region in which you are in down to the city, county or even town, this can be quite uncanny, to say the least.

Facebook Numbers: 1.31 Billion Active Daily Users

Well, as you might be aware, Facebook is the number one social networking website which boasts of 1.71 billion active monthly users.  And to go in for more detail, 1.13 billion people logged in on average every single day in the month of June 2016, making for an increase of 17% year-on-year according to Facebook Statistics. The upshot of all this numbers is that if you get your digital marketing strategy right on Facebook, there is no end to how you can profit from this engagement.Without further ado, let us dig in deep and see how the latest algorithmic change will affect marketers, who use the medium to search for and engage customers to purchase their products.

• Far Reaching Impact on Publishers- For starters, this algorithm has been designed by Facebook in order to ostensibly increase family and friends engagement time on the platform. That means that they want people to interact more on a personal level than on spending time looking at adverts or content from third-party publishers. This means that as a publisher, you should expect dwindling numbers in viewership of your (third-party) content on the platform.

• You Will Pay More – Having said that, it looks like the main purpose of this massive, earth-shattering algorithm change was to reduce (eliminate) content which was in direct competition with the Facebook ads. The model is fairly simple; squeeze out external content, let the publishers go through the entire emotional cycle from anger, shock to ultimately coughing up a few extra dollars in FB ad purchases.

• Ad Costs Will Skyrocket – As mentioned above, the price of Digital marketing for individual ads will skyrocket as more people will be competing for a scarce(finite) resource. It is a simple law of economics known as the law of supply and demand. To put this in technical speak, the costs per engagement of your FB ads will go up and up and up.

• Instant Article Explosion – Instant articles are those types of articles which you post straight on the Facebook Platform. These articles have been a great hit of late, largely due to the fact they get a higher priority in the FB newsfeed than links that drive viewership back to the originating publishers’ websites.

The viable option for you as a publisher of content is to make sure that you work on driving traffic to your website even as you continue creating and posting instant articles on FB.This will be a form of insurance in the event that you find the penalty on content on FB a bit too much to bear.

• Go Easy on The Video- Video is a much beloved medium for people on any type of social media and FB is no exception to this rule. And the fact is that most publishers have been working overtime to make sure that they do get their content in video format in order to attract these eyeballs. This algorithm will have an impact on video and the deciding factor will be the quality and not quantity of video that you post on FB.

Key Takeaways

The numbers from video posts speak for themselves and the fact of the matter is that most people love this medium so you must learn to use it for your benefit. The key take away from all this is that you should not get into a depression due to this algorithm change but rather, you should take a proactive stance and make the necessary changes in order to reap from the large numbers of traffic that the website enjoys.The future is not all gloom and doom, though, for you the avid FB publisher, since if you manage to make this transition to adapting to the rules, then you will have the first mover advantage and thus enjoy long-lasting benefits on your published content. In a nutshell, get your act together quickly and effectively as change is inevitable in any industry and as the famous evolutionary saying goes, “survival is for the fittest”.[author]About the Author: Selina Jenkins is an expert digital marketing consultant who runs her operations out of the San Francisco Bay area. She has as her clients several Fortune 50 companies; she manages an ad inventory of more than $170 million dollars for her clients. [/author]