FB Newsfeed Changes: 6 Things To Do

If you are marketing online courses and other offers using Facebook, you are likely wondering how the recent Facebook changes will impact your marketing strategy. As you have likely already seen, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that Facebook is making changes to the platform’s news feed algorithm with the goal of creating more “meaningful social interaction” by focusing on relevant content to users.

What does this mean when you are marketing online courses on Facebook?

We have talked about how to use Facebook to market online courses. Facebook is a powerful tool to reach your people.

The initial impact when marketing your programs will be on organic posting reach (the number of people that see your posts you make on your Facebook page without paying to boost the reach). Let’s be honest, most brands are no longer seeing strong organic reach—the latest data I saw was that 2% of your followers are likely to see a post if you don’t put ad dollars behind it. So, no big loss on organic reach. However, this could mean that more brands will be using paid traffic which means costs could go up in the long haul.

6 things you can do now to increase free reach when marketing your online courses on Facebook:

1-Engage.

The more your audience engages with your page, the more Facebook will reward your page posts by showing it to more people. Like and comment when others comment on your posts. Seems kind of simple, right? But, we all want to be acknowledged when we join a conversation. Be the brand that is in conversation with their audience—not the brand talking “at” their audience.

2-Use Facebook Live.

Facebook is going to reward Facebook Live over videos that are hosted on your site or a third-party hosting. Get comfortable posting live and posting more video. I’m challenging myself to do more of this and you can join me in this.

3-Share more of who you are.

Your audience will engage with you more when they connect with you as a real person rather than a cardboard brand. One of my Inner Circle clients posts business-related updates on both her “personal” page and a business page.  The “personal” page is essentially connections to her 1000’s of online course participants. She is transparent and absolutely engaging sharing the day to day behind-the-scenes of her business. I am amazed that she consistently gets more responses on her “personal” page with posts getting 150 or more likes and comments.  Brilliant.

4-Focus on going deeper with your clients.

Instead of thinking about paying for ads to simply fill a program, think about building a deeper relationship with your clients over time. Once your client finds you on Facebook, staying in relationship with them and having them continue to invest with you makes the initial investment to get that client smaller and smaller over the lifetime value of the customer.

5-Use Facebook Groups.

Posts from groups are more likely to be seen in the feed. Use the power of private Facebook groups to increase the reach of your posts.

6-Invite your friends and followers to choose the “see first” option on your page.

This will let Facebook know that they want to see what you are posting. You can share this on your business page or in an email to update your followers.

All in all, this is a good thing. We want Facebook to deliver great content so that our audience wants to regularly connect. Rewarding meaningful content is a powerful way to clean up the clutter.

Are you using any of these strategies now? What’s working for you in connecting with your audience?