At the start of the year, a new Facebook algorithm came into play and frankly it caused a lot of panic for businesses as impacted brand social reach. The social media giant announced that they would prioritise family and friends above businesses, leading to a drop in organic reach for affiliates to acquire site traffic from social media pages.
There is no need to panic as you can still work your site content in Facebook with the tips below to help you continue to engage audiences and grow your social reach.
1) Inspire conversation
The pages that get the highest reach tend to be the ones with a lot of customer engagement, which begs the question how do you get that customer engagement on your social media page?
The best way to do this is to inspire conversation with your followers. Asking for their opinion and weighing in on a conversation will naturally grow their engagement. If you are a casino affiliate – talk about the latest slot games, run mini goodwill bonus competitions and create VIP loyalty rewards for members in the community who share their player experiences. Sports Betting affiliates can engage conversation about how the latest event is tipped to play out, or what people think about the recent news around popular sporting events.
When people do interact with your page, make sure you comment back to them and interact – no one likes to be shouting into the vacuum and a conversation has and always will be a two way street.
2) Audit your presence
Are you really contributing on social media? Taking the time to work out whether you’re adding value or not is incredibly helpful for affiliates. Remember that Facebook is constantly auditing you, so you should be auditing your own presence on there too.
If you’re authentic on social media and actually contribute, then you can rest assured that you will be rewarded. You can automate a lot of this with intelligent social media tools like Social Bakers or Meet Edgar but you still need to be present in person to engage and listen to what your community and followers are saying. You can’t just be shouting out news or information , you need to be talking and adding value from your own expertise and experiences too.
3) Always Refresh your page
If you haven’t refreshed your Facebook page in a while, then take a look at it from an outsider’s perspective. Think of it as a mini version of your website and figure out whether it’s really making a good first impression. Boil down your best promotions and niche selling points on this platform, with a link to your full site for those that want to learn more. Make sure the images you use are always relevant and resonate with the audience you are trying to connect with. Don’t use badly formatted images that don’t scale across devices. It makes you look spammy and immediately makes people drop off the page as they think it’s unprofessional.
High quality photos and enticing information will help your page to really sell your affiliate portal. There are plenty of places you can get high quality images for commercial use – FREE such as Pixabay. Other tools you can use to create unique content for social channels are RIPL and Wordswag – all fo these tools can be used on your mobile whilst you are travelling in to your office on the tube!
4) Make Use of live video whenever possible
Facebook loves live video, as it shows you want to contribute something valuable to their platform. They give prominence to those that regularly put out this content, as it makes the platform look better too. Make sure you comment back to people that comment on your live stream videos too.
Affiliates can sometimes find it difficult to identify opportunities for live video, but all it takes is a little imagination. Live prize draws, games, interviews and comments on matches can drastically boost your reach. A good example of this is betrades.gr They created their own social community and tipping talk show using their office as the backdrop. With over 24K in followed now engaged in their community it’s clear this strategy is working for them.
5) Don’t clickbait and watch how you link
Sounds a bit obvious but let’s face it – clickbait is annoying. We all know it and so does Facebook. They know that their users don’t want to see listicles that promise everything with no real payoff, so these won’t get you anywhere. They also don’t want sharebait either, which is when you force people to share to unlock a perk.
You know that these statuses just pollute Facebook and the algorithm does too, so create valuable content instead to improve your reach. Don’t waste time trying to game the platform as it will only serve to give a negative connotation to your brand.
Links can be tricky territory for Facebook too, as they want to provide additional information but they want to keep people within their platform. This is why they’ve put so much onus on instant articles for example, as they can share useful information while still keeping you inside the app.
You can use links to take people to further information or to enhance your status, but you should steer clear of just adding them for the sake of it. Don’t share the same links over and over either, as this will also be picked up by the algorithm and decrease your reach over time.
In conclusion
The biggest thing to come out of this shake up is the fact that you can’t do the same old thing and expect new results. Your page for your affiliate portal may have been ticking along quite nicely last year, but this year you need to up your game for similar or improved results. Content is still king for social and seo and it means you need to invest time to make it really work.
Audit your current Facebook strategy and assess the reach, then you will have a baseline to work with. As you make changes, plot the reach and engagements against this baseline to inform a further strategy. This platform requires more thought and foresight than ever before, so do your homework get invested and build a community that follows your lead.
