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Facebook Pushing Video Over Photos: Time to Change Your Marketing Strategy?

With the ever-changing landscape of social media you can expect some speed bumps every once in a while and a recent update on Facebook may have caused you a headache you didn’t know you had. If you, like many others, use the ‘News Feed Algorithm’ to gain followers and page hits you will notice a drop in activity. Last August Facebook announced that it would be cracking down of the use of posting pictures to ‘like bait’ using the native link format. Although image links have a poor reach, they hold the highest engagement numbers of all media on Facebook. In the official release by Facebook they want to, “prioritize showing links in the link-format, and show fewer links shared in captions or status updates.” It will definitely make for a cleaner news feed, especially for those using smaller devices, but why the change, why now?

Attribute Type Average
Reach
Avg. Viral
Reach (%)
Avg. Viral
Reach (#)
Avg. Engaged
Users (%)
Avg. Engaged
Users (#)
Link Share 754 0.0385 0 1.4329 10
Image 670 1.7406 5 2.9278 18
Status Update 3591 0.0449 1 0.3443 8

The drastic reversal of photos losing their precedence can be linked to a post by Facebook in June of 2014 when it was revealed that they have changed how they rank the videos people and pages upload directly to Facebook thus making sure videos were shown more often and much more prominently than people and pages. To further elaborate on the push for more video play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this past November that in five years he believes most content will be in video format and that in the month of October more than 3 billion views were counted each day.

If your audience is use to your photo post and they look forward to them, don’t stop posting, just think of adding videos as a part of your new overall Facebook marketing strategy. Videos are a great format to gain attention and popularity. Consumers love them. Look at YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and Snapchat. Videos are the biggest trend in social media right now and adding them to content strategies would be huge. It’s very important for business owners to stay on top of what trends are hot. But remember, these trends are not going to be for everyone, do what works for you and your audience.

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