From Consumption to Connection: Facebook for Marketers in 2018
Facebook recently highlighted some adjustments they'll make in order to build more person-to-person engagement at their F8 Developer Conference. It gives us some insight as to what kind of content marketers will need to produce in order to be successful in 2018 and on.
VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri stated that despite keeping in touch with friends and family being a primary reason people use Facebook, the News Feed had been drowning out some of those important conversations.
Facebook has a plan to change this.
One of the major changes will be how their algorithm scores content and decides what to show. Mosseri breaks down key elements to how it's decided.
How the News Feed works
Inventory: This is all of the content that you could see based on people and Pages you follow
Signals: The algorithm prioritizes the Inventory according to how important it likely is to you. Some of the signals are poster, post date, your response to similar posts, your internet speed, device, etc.
Predictions: The system judges the content and predicts how you'll react to it based on your personal history as well as more general, universal reactions.
Score: Each content is finally scored and shown accordingly. This happens each time you visit Facebook.
This process will be tweaked. The new News Feed will still look at how likely you'll like or read a post, but they will begin putting more emphasis on how likely it'll spark a conversation between you and your friends, for example.
What the News Feed changes means for marketers
Facebook's attempts to prioritize bringing people together and increasing connections presents a challenge to a lot of marketers. There's suddenly a need to produce content that sparks conversations.
Mosseri shared this chart showcasing the types of posts and their average engagement.
While many marketers like to post about their new product and link to their website, it's clear that this actually gets the worst engagement. With Facebook now emphasizing conversations and relationships more, it can be expected that these types of posts will do worse from now going forward.
It's also worth noting that posts from Groups - something Facebook has been pushing and that has been a growing trend for brands to start - ranks high. This further reinforces the need for businesses to be part of the conversations that happen on Facebook.
Here's the full presentation: From Consumption to Connection
