In December of 2013, Facebook had announced a major algorithm update that was much talked about in the media. At that time they tweaked their news feed algorithms so that more relevant and high quality articles were given higher coverage and eyeballs.
After the update, many media sites and publishers who shared update on their Facebook pages saw sudden drop in the amount of reach their status updates about news stories (which has web links in them). Here is one of the studies that showed 42% drop in fan penetration.
Our own Trak.in page saw significant drop in reach of our posts after December 2013 news feed update. The drop we witnessed was over 50 percent.
Now, Facebook has again announced yesterday that they are making yet another change to their News Feed algorithms. As per their announcement, the latest update will do a better job of differentiating between the status updates by friends as compared to status updates by Facebook pages.
Facebook has categorically mentioned that – “Facebook Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.”
What Facebook Suggests & What Should You Do To Get More EyeBalls?
Simply put, the new update being pushed by Facebook will offer more reach and eyeballs to text updates as compared to link type posts from friends. This is true in the case of individual users. However, when the updates are done on a Facebook page, the link type posts will get slightly better engagement and reach as compared to text updates.
So, if you are an individual user, a update like the one shown below will give you a better reach:
On the other hand, If you post the same message on a Facebook page, it should be posted as a link post for a wider reach and better engagement. It should show up something like this:
And here is what Facebook themselves recommend, they say,
In general, we recommend that you use the story type that best fits the message that you want to tell – whether that’s a status, photo, link or video.
Generally, what has been suggested above should work most of the times, however, from what we have seen, Facebook is not really all that forthcoming about various signals that they consider in ranking a particular story or news update. They have other signals, like your interests, your past click and comment history etc which influences what you see and what is skipped.
Our suggestion is that you run various type of tests yourself to see what works best and then follow the best one.
If something works for you well, do share with us so that wider audience can benefit from it too!