As members of the digital marketing community you must all be aware of the recent tightening of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm. You should also know what that means for the reach and engagement of organic posts from business pages. In summary, it’s bad, real bad. If you want to refresh your memory check out this blog post from Facebook’s Ads Product Marketing team manager Brian Bolan.
Debates about ulterior motives and hidden agendas aside, the simple fact of the matter is that, unless you’re willing to fork out, yours and/or your client’s Facebook reach and engagement will continue to tail off into nothingness, right?
Well, not necessarily. During extensive testing on client Facebook pages our team stumbled across an extremely simple yet incredibly effective way of pulling back some of that dwindling reach and engagement and potentially even surpass previous levels.
Simply put, all you need to do is re-share already successful, relevant video content.
That’s right; it really can be as easy as that.
Why It Works
When you think about it logically it makes complete sense. Re-sharing a post that has already received positive engagement seems to kick Facebook’s algorithm into action as it expects the content to be just as well received by your audience.
It’s also no secret that Facebook users, and therefore Facebook, love video content. Jump over to your Facebook newsfeed now and have a look at how many videos, or links to videos, you see. Quite a few right? While you’re there take a look at their engagement metrics, I bet most of them are fairly impressive.
This combination of a successful content medium and the previous posts engagement success seems to give your sharing of it precedence over other posts that could be served to your target audience in their newsfeed.
The Knock On Effect
So, you may be asking yourself what the point is. ‘You can get high engagement on sharing content that isn’t yours? Well done.’ We can completely understand your scepticism. Ultimately, this tip could be worthless if it doesn’t affect engagement and reach where it matters, on your own content.
Well, what we’ve noticed is that the reach and engagement rates on our own content shares HAVE also seen a positive trend since we started regularly sharing existing successful video content.
This means that, at a time when Facebook is reducing reach for non-paid, self-promotional posts our clients are actually seeing improvements in their organic reach and engagement metrics. This is something we, and many others in the industry, never thought we would see again.
Of course, I don’t expect you to just take my word for it. Here are some cold, hard stats to back it all up.
Here’s organic post reach, likes, comments & shares. You can see the increase in everything from January onwards.
Page and tab visits have also increased significantly since we employed this new technique.
Finally, here’s our post reach information from the past couple of months. Reach and engagement levels have increased significantly. Unfortunately, because Facebook won’t show us data earlier than a few months you’ll just have to take our word for it.
So, all signs point to the fact that sharing previously successful video content will lead to improved engagement metrics for your business page.
But wait, there’s more…
We’ve got a few tips to help you choose the best video posts to share!
1. Click the video posts timestamp to get its static, shareable URL.
This is the way we like to do it, just copy the URL into the post box then delete it once the preview has loaded. This will ensure you carry over the existing success.
2. Make sure the videos have a minimum level of previous engagement.
This will vary dependant on the client and their existing Facebook audience size. We like to work with posts that have no less than 10,000 views.
3. Short and sweet works best.
Think vine length clips. The general social media audience wants instant gratification. Sharing a video that is too long can sometimes put people off. Find out more about this here.
4. When sharing, ask a question.
This is a cheap and effective way of increasing post comments and therefore engagement. If you can stimulate conversation, do it.
5. Make sure the post is relevant.
You may have just found a video with over 1 million views and 100,000 likes but if it’s not relevant to your audience it’s not going to cut it.
6. Create an interests list on Facebook to curate content
Creating an interests list on Facebook is one of the simplest ways to gather shareable content. By liking pages that share content that fits your subject matter, and adding them to a list, you can create a custom newsfeed of fresh content for you to re-share. This is the simplest way we have found of curating new content. You can find more information about interest lists in Facebook’s help centre.
So, what are you waiting for, get out there and start re-sharing. What we really want to hear are your success stories using this method. If you see your post engagement jump when you start sharing successful video content, we’d love to hear about it.
Alternatively, if you want to know more about how we run our social media campaigns follow the link.
