What Facebook Changes Mean For Charities
Facebook recently announced that they are making significant changes to Newsfeed to show fewer brands and media in user newsfeeds, but what does that mean for charities?
Changes to the newsfeed algorithm, which will limit the amount of branded content and media-related articles people will see in their feed, are coming soon.
For charities and small organisations in particular, this poses the question of how best to create and share content that will continue to reach current and new audiences.
An opt-in approach (as the sector has seen more broadly) should be taken with existing audiences, likely delivering similar challenges. People can select to ‘See First’ in their newsfeed for Page content: getting them to do it will be the challenge. This should, however, ultimately lead to a more engaged (but smaller) audience. That said, Facebook has announced that posts that create and generate conversation will continue to be shown in a higher position in people’s news feeds. Live video is the top biller in terms of conversation, with live streams getting 6 times higher interactions than regular page posts. So it’s still all about video.
Similar changes were made to Gmail in the not-so-distant-past, by way of a handy tab that packages promotions and ‘spammy’ emails into a neat individual folder. Users are able to side-track this by actively opting-in to receiving them (en-masse or individually) in their main inbox. You might think that a convenient folder for all the promotions users receive would become an untouched relic of emails passed their expiry date, but studies (like this one) have shown at least 41.5% of people still use their promotions tab.
Organically algorithms are changing, but in terms of paid media, Facebook, (as ever) seems to be staying strong with the same format, taking money from any brand that wants to reach wider audiences. This could pose a big risk to smaller charities, so community building on and offline will be more important than ever.