Big Changes to Your Council Facebook Pages

How can you maximize the potential of your local BSA Facebook pages?

If somebody asked you what the most effective type of content on Facebook was for reaching your audience and driving engagement, you might have said photos – and up until recently, you would have been very right.  But when it comes to Facebook, the only thing that never changes is that nothing stays the same. Facebook has made a habit of tinkering with the algorithm it uses to prioritize the exposure it gives to users and their content.

What we’re now seeing as an undeniable trend is that photos are no longer the sure-fire way to maximize the reach of any given post. In fact, if the data from Socialbakers that BusinessInsider.com published on Tuesday holds water, photos are now decidedly the least effective form of content at generating organic reach.  Native videos (videos uploaded directly to Facebook) are far and away the #1 driver of organic reach followed by text-only posts, links, and then photos.

Check out the article for yourself.

(Graph Socialbakers via Business Insider)

The take-away here isn’t to abandon using photos altogether.  Rather, you should test the validity of this on your own pages.  Use the Facebook Insights tab on your pages to pay close attention to the organic reach various forms of content are generating for you. Challenge the manager of your pages to experiment with different forms of content and continually optimize against the learnings, because what works in Washington state may not work in Washington D.C., and what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

So how do these findings play out on your council’s Facebook pages?  Any secret sauce you’ve run across that the rest of us could also experiment with?  Let us know by leaving a comment.

Interested in more resources?  Click here to visit the Marketing Toolbox to find the social media playbook, access to the Flickr photo repository, and more.