Have you noticed a drop in your social media engagement recently? It’s not you. It’s them. Algorithm experts have recently stated that engagement percentages are down about 30% – 33% since this time last year. Why? Because you’re competing with more paid ads than ever before. You probably don’t even notice it but almost 25% of your Facebook feed consists of advertisements and paid posts. The reality is, we need to learn how to be better marketers as the industry grows – we can’t just ‘post and pray’ anymore. It’s time to get serious about conquering the beast that is the social media algorithm.
If you don’t know how to conquer your social channels, how do you expect to find leads? One of my most popular topics that I teach is the importance of understanding social media algorithms and how to overcome them. Think of your algorithm as the health of your account. If it’s healthy, you’re getting in front of the right people, if it’s not, then you’re not presenting your brand in a way that will help you attract leads. This is important to learn for the health of your accounts and for your business! In this post, I’m going to give you 5 ways to overcome the social media algorithms.
- Stay consistent ALWAYS!
You’ve heard me say this before – but, consistency is important for so many reasons. One of them being to maintain a healthy algorithm rating. I have noticed that when people are inconsistent with posting, it is 10x harder to get your algorithm back to what it was previously. As soon as you skip a day, you lose a post in the news feed that boosts your algorithm. If I skip a day, then someone else takes the spot where I would’ve posted. Then, the next day I decide to post, I’m not going to get the spot I had before when I was consistent. TIP: Schedule out your content ahead of time.
- Your content must be native to the platform.
Native = never before seen content/not repurposed. What does that mean? Facebook only wants content that was created on Facebook using their features. For example – you CAN go onto Facebook and create a post with text that you’ve just written on the platform. You CAN’T create a graphic in Canva and post it onto your wall, otherwise it will not be shown to nearly as many people as if you just posted a photo of yourself directly from the timeline or just created a text post. If you repost a memory that pops up onto your wall, that’s not native. It’s already been shown before. Don’t post any links to your wall that you’ve gathered from somewhere else. (Especially YouTube! That’s Facebook’s competitor). TIP: Take a picture directly from the Facebook posting feature and post that right onto your wall. Or, use a background everytime you only post text.
- Write your posts in a way that spur comments.
Figure out how you best get your audience to engage (this may involve quite a few trial runs) and then get people to comment and engage with you as often as possible. Preferably every time you post a story or post! Ask questions. Come up with a strong call-to-action. TIP: If you’re writing a really long post that explains something vulnerable that’s going on in your life, move it to Instagram! Facebook doesn’t like posts with photos that exceed too many text lines.
- Head directly to your stories after posting.
Make sure you’re showing up in your stories every day! Especially after you post, you should feature in your stories that you just posted something and prompt people to go check it out. When Facebook rolled out stories, those that were consistent in posting on their stories got triple the engagement on their timeline than those that weren’t!
- Reciprocate.
This should go without saying, but how do you expect to have an engaging audience if you’re not going to engage back? Go to people who are viewing your stories and view their stories. Go to people who are commenting on your posts and comment on theirs! Build a community, not an audience.
I hope these few hacks get you back on track with your social media algorithms! Go crush your day, Goal Digger!
If you want to see how I used these hacks in my business, watch my latest #getLIT training!
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