With enormous traffic, incredible reach, and great analytics, Facebook is one of the most important platforms for video marketing. Recently, however, they made a significant change to their News Feed Algorithm which affects how often your videos will be seen.
Below, we’ll discuss exactly what these changes are, and what they mean for your business. We’ll wrap up by providing some useful tips to take advantage of these changes.
Emphasizing Popularity Versus Engagement
On Facebook, statistics are everything. Facebook carefully tracks every single view, like, and comment a user makes on every post, article, and video. Previously, video marketing was weighted heavily towards engagement statistics. The more that users liked, shared, and commented on a video, the more likely it was to appear in the feed of similar users.
The problem with these metrics is that they didn’t track a true user experience. Quite often, users will browse through their timeline, take the time to watch a video or read a post, but then decide not to share or comment any further. Even though the video was relevant and worthwhile, the algorithm wasn’t catching these views.
To combat this, Facebook has changed the algorithm to focus more on in-video user actions. This means things like clicks, views, and completion percentages. The end result is that a wider variety of user experiences are taken into account and more relevant videos are presented to users.
Not everyone that watches your videos will share with a friend, so Facebook decided to make a change.
What These Changes Mean For Your Business
If your business has relied on generating a lot of likes, shares, and comments for your videos, you should still be in fairly good shape. Unless your audience liked you so much that they were blindly commenting and sharing your content, they were probably interacting with your videos by watching them, too.
If your engagement wasn’t high to begin with, or if you want to boost your reach even further, now is the perfect time. Here’s what you should do to take advantage of Facebook’s new algorithm:
- Focus on creating exciting headlines. You need to grab attention immediately in order to grab clicks and views, so you need a great headline that appeals to your audience.
- Make sure every single video has a great opening hook. Once you have your audience’s attention, you need to keep them from scrolling down their timeline further. Grabbing their interest right away is the best way to boost your metrics.
- Keep your videos succinct. The longer they go, the more chance viewers will have to get bored and scroll away. A short video will have a better completion percentage and look better to Facebook.
Not only will people like your videos, they’ll start watching them!
If you’re looking to help improve your video marketing even more, make sure to reach out to us here at Blue Wave Marketing. We keep up to date with all the important video marketing trends so we can help you make sure you’re always ahead of the curve on Facebook, YouTube, and any other video marketing platform you want to use.
