Things are constantly changing on the social media landscape. If you made it a priority to track of Facebook’s latest algorithm change and the latest social media buzzword you wouldn’t even have time to get your work done. Luckily for you, that’s our job.
On that note, we thought we would update you on a couple of recent changes that could have a significant effect on our outreach efforts. There’s tons more happening, of course (are you following us on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates?), but these are two pretty big ones that we want to make sure you know about:
1. Facebook pages
Facebook is changing the way it shows page posts in people’s feeds — basically they are downgrading the value of all page posts, so while it will still help to have the sort of good content that generates real engagement, it is even then going to be harder and harder to even show up in people’s feeds without paying for ads.
Some time around the beginning of December, Facebook changed its algorithm in such a way that every user’s news feed was tweaked slightly – more relevant, newsy-type stories and shared articles by friends would be seen, but at the expense of posts by pages. Many businesses, including small-to-medium-sized businesses that can’t really afford huge marketing budgets, saw the potential of social media marketing some years back and have built up healthy followings and a good number of likes on their Facebook pages. However, this recent move by Facebook is an attempt to get companies to pay to reach these audiences.
“We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site. We’re getting to a place where because more people are sharing more things, the best way to get your stuff seen if you’re a business is to pay for it,” says a document produced by Facebook.
2. Gmail Servers
Gmail is changing the way it hosts images, which — without going into the technical nitty-gritty — means we are going to have a harder time tracking when people actually open/read emails. This means open rates are going to go down across the board, and will not be reflective of actual open rates. The open-rate metric has always been a proxy, but this information can amount of any drop we see.
Google has just announced a move that will shut most of these tactics down: it will cache all images for Gmail users. Embedded images will now be saved by Google, and the e-mail content will be modified to display those images from Google’s cache, instead of from a third-party server. E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen.
More details on this change available here.
We’re not sure yet how these changes will be affecting our clients and services, but we are hard at work here figuring out how to make your online outreach efforts work for you, and we have ideas cooking on both fronts to make sure we’re changing tactics to account for these changes.