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Creating content for social media algorithms – and your audience

Algorithm this. Algorithm that…

What the heck is a social media algorithm and why is everyone talking about it?

With all the changes taking place on your favourite platforms, there is a lot of discussion about how to create content effectively so your audience will actually see it. But a lot of people forget that when you create content, yes you are creating it for the platform, but first and foremost you’re creating it for your audience.

So what does this all mean? Let’s break it down.

What is a social media algorithm?

Social media algorithms kind of feel like a gatekeeper to your content… Or a troll under a bridge that refuses to let you cross. But when you think of it, there are so many users on each platform sharing SO MUCH content, social media platform developers figure it would be too overwhelming to leave it up to people to sift through. So, they created algorithms to help. (It’s either smart or one step closer to robot domination – I’ll let you choose. 😉) Regardless of how you feel about algorithms, they are here to stay, so you need to know how it all works.

A social media algorithm ranks social media posts based on set rules and data associated with the platform – things like overall engagement, content type, shares, and quality. They analyze user behaviour so they can present what they determine is relevant and high quality content every time a user signs in. Because we’re all unique, how social media algorithms read our behaviour is also unique, so our social feeds are all different – we’re like snowflakes!

How do social media algorithms work?

You know WHAT it is, but you also need to know how the algorithm works for each social platform you are on. And they like to keep things fresh, so things are constantly changing. But if you understand the basics, you can build your strategy around that. Let’s break down the basics of how four of the top algorithms work:

Facebook

Based on machine learning and data science, Facebook’s algorithm looks at:

  • Content source: From brands to friends, family, and everything in between, it’s all based on who users follow and engage with a source. The more they engage, the more content they will be shown from that source.
  • Content type: Again, based on what users like the most – but think video, pictures, and links.
  • Engagement: Any time a user interacts with your content (likes, comments, shares) it signals higher quality content.

Instagram

Instagram has been going through… a lot of changes these days. This can present as a huge challenge to marketers. The platform’s algorithm affects the order of posts in a user’s feed, featured content on the explore page, whether or not your Reels are featured, and the order of featured stories at the top of user feeds. Overall, you need to know about three things:

  • Engagement: The more users interact with your content the more your content will be shown to them.
  • Content Type: It’s no secret that Instagram is gravitating towards Reels (video) and they are prioritizing Reels content above all else at the moment.
  • Relevancy and Quality: Based on user preference, how likely are users to interact with and share your content.

Twitter

Twitter uses machine learning, but you should focus on these things:

  • Relevancy: This can be anything from topic, timing, and even location of a content source.
  • Engagement: The more someone engages with your content the more likely your content will be shown to users.
  • Content Type: Images, videos, GIFs, and polls do well on the platform rather than just text-based content.

TikTok

The “belle of the ball” these days… You need to focus on appearing on For You Pages. There are a few factors to consider:

  • Engagement: How users interact with yours and other content will fuel the platforms recommended content.
  • Content: Your captions, hashtags, sounds, and filters affect who your videos will be shown to. If someone interacts with a lot of similar content, then your content will be recommended.
  • Account: Location and language settings are used to suggest content and creators to users on the platform.

How do I create content when algorithms exist?

Well… you just… create it. Sigh… If only it were that simple, right!?

Here are a few key takeaways from the simplified breakdown of the algorithms:

  • Know your audience: It’s hard to be all things to all people and you need to get consistent engagement with people who are your customers and potential customers so your content is shown to them more. So pick a niche and create content for that niche.
  • Stay current, stay relevant: Check out what’s trending on your social platforms and create content based on that – but make it your own. This could be trending topics, trending content types, etc. We’ve created a handy guide to figure this out!
  • Use hashtags wisely: Don’t spam tag your content – on any platform. Choose your hashtags based on the content you have created and based on keywords that are relevant to your audience and business. And while you’re at it, make sure you’re using keywords in your captions as well – it’s not just about the hashtag.
  • Encourage engagement: What do you want your audience to do? Do you want them to comment? Share? Like? Why not ask? But remember it’s not just about asking for engagement; it’s about giving them a REASON to engage as well.
  • Stay consistent: Posting a flurry of posts when you get started and then disappearing for a month isn’t helpful. Neither is posting once per week. You need to post consistently on whatever platform you have chosen. It may take a little trial and error to see what the optimal posting frequency is, but the key is to remain consistent. And remember that consistency is also related to timing, so you need to figure out when your audience wants to hear from you.
  • Know what type of content performs best: If the platform you’re on wants video, you need to create more video (hello, Instagram!). It’s also important to remember that things like watermarks from other platforms may affect your quality score if you share with a watermark across all socials. For example, Instagram isn’t fond of TikTok watermarks on reels shared to the platform.
  • Get social: I’ve talked about this a lot, but social media has “social” in the title or a reason. Each platform likes it when you’re active. That means content sharing and engaging with other people on the platform.
  • Quality is Queen: Each algorithm is there to determine whether your content is high or low quality. Focus on creating high quality content rather than just churning out as much content as possible. Your followers and other social media users won’t interact with your content unless they find it interesting, so you need to start listening and figure out what is interesting to your audience – go beyond content. You need to surprise and delight with a little bit of entertainment.

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Candace Huntly is the Founder at SongBird Marketing Communications, an award-winning agency working to take organizational and individual brands to the next level. With a passion for all things related to creativity and strategy, she specializes in media relations, influencer marketing, organic community engagement, content, and adapting strategies for any sized business – large or small. Basically, if you need to put your brand, product, or cause in the public eye, she will find a way to do it, while making the approach unique to you.

Connect with Candace

Sign up for our free 20-minute consultation and we’ll help you figure things out.

A version of this article was originally posted to the SongBird Marketing Communications blog.

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Facebook News Feed: How does it work?

Kelly headshot (2)

Have you ever wondered how Facebook’s news feed work? Or how Facebook decides what content to show in your news feed?  In this blog we are going to tell you how the news feed works and how you can create more visibility for your brand

 

  1. Facebook decides what to show you in your news feed based on other similar content that you browse.

For example  if you spend most of your day reading articles about animals, watching videos about animals, then you will see more content about pets and animals on your news feed.

How do you get your content to show on your fans news feeds?  You need to create content that engages your users, and keeps them around.  The longer users spend on your content, the more likely they are to see your updates in their feed.

There are a few ways to do this.  Don’t use deceptive headlines, this won’t win you any points with Facebook’s algorithm.  Make sure you have great content.  You want a catchy headline that will make people click on your link, video or instant article.

How much content is enough?  Don’t make content for web and mobile too long.  The majority of people have a very short attention span when interacting with online content, especially articles and videos. While the algorithm measures time on content, there is a maximum threshold.

 

  1. Content Diversity

Due to feedback from users, Facebook plans to implement some diversity in it’s news feeds.  Users have complained about seeing the same content, back to back, from the same publisher, pages or sources.  Facebook learned that users want to see wide-ranging content from different publishers.

Diversity can be harder nut to crack, but there is a very simple way.  Make sure you post your blog on multiple site, get friends pages to share it, if you have partners, ask them to share your info.  The more places that your content lives, the more likely it will appear in people’s news feeds.  I do however want to suggest caution, as having your content on too many sites can damage your google search rating.  It’s all about finding the right balance.

The other thing you can do is to re-purpose old content, and share that to your page via other links like from your blog, your LinkedIn page, employees pages.  You have more content to draw from and share than you realize.

 

  1. Facebook wants to show you the stories that it thinks will matter most to you

This is an easy on to achieve, create stories that matter to your audience.  Are you involved in the community? write a blog about it.  Do you help out with charity drives? write a blog about it.  Did an employee of yours win an award? write a blog about it.  Creating stories is easy because there are so many around you if you just take the time to really connect with your customers and employees.

 

  1. Shows you content based on the friends you have and pages you follow

I’m sure you’ve seen this in action.  You follow a new business page, and BAM, their content starts to show up in your news feed.  Pretty convenient right?

Well, here’s how you can start to take advantage of that for your business.  You have all these fans, maybe thousands, that like your page and have shown interest in what you do or what you offer.  Encourage your fans to share your content.  The more that they share, the more your content will appear on their friends news feeds.  Identify who your regulars are.  Who is always commenting, sharing and engaged with your content? Give them a shout out, recommend that other people follow them.

You can also start following other businesses, recommend other businesses who you have had successful partnerships with in the past.  All of this not only helps you gain more exposure to followers of these groups, but also helps to build your brand awareness and recognition.

 

  1. Types of content users interact with

This one is pretty straight forward, if users tend to watch more videos on Facebook, then their feed will tend to include more video content.  Same goes for text, photos and links.

To overcome this obstacle, be sure to have a wide variety of mediums for your content.  Have a good mix of text, video, pictures and links.

 

  1. Engagement can beat Recency

Lets talk about engagement first.  If a post has a lot of engagement with your audience, it will be more likely to show up compared to something posted recently.  For example, if someone posted content yesterday that got a lot of engagement and you decided to share that same content today, Facebook would prioritize the post with the highest engagement to show up on the news feed.

For recency, be sure you post everyday.  If you take a few days off from posting anything, then you will be less likely to show up in news feeds because your audience also follows pages who may post more often and therefore will have a higher chance of showing up.

So make sure that you post often and that you are getting engagement on the content you are posting.

 

  1. Users can control their news feed

While this is an option for all users, most people are unaware of this option.  Users can hide posts from friends and pages, while still remaining friends and fans of those same pages.  Users can also tell Facebook which pages they would like to see first in their news feed.

Make the assumption that most users don’t know about this option, then tell them how they can be sure to see your content first in their news feed.  Take a screen shot of your page with the instructions of “how to see us first”  Then pin it to the top of your page or make it a part of your cover photo.

FB

Companies like Facebook and Google are constantly changing how their algorithms work, so it can be a full time job staying on top of the changes and understanding what they mean for your business.  Keep up with the changes and adapt your content to meet those changes and you will see better results.

 

Teach Me Social owner Kelly Farrell has been helping empower Canadian Small Business owners through social media for over three years. Her team now offers services ranging from training sessions for small business owners and their teams, to full-service social media account management. Visit teachmesocial.ca to learn more about our service offerings or to contact us today for a no obligation consultation, including an audit of your existing social media channels.

SEO: Getting Found by Search Engines

SEOsweetspot

 

In the fourth post in this series, I described social strategy: which social platforms you may want to prioritise for your business, depending on your conversion funnel.  Over the next 2 months of this series, we’ll finish fleshing out the remaining pieces of the content strategy puzzle, and this month we’ll tackle a murky and mysterious area: search engine optimisation.

There are 6 basic ways to get your business found online, and while each one is important and some of them are closely connected, how you prioritize them and which one(s) you focus your time and money on depends on the way your target users are seeking your type of product or service, and the value of a conversion for your business.

 

The Six Basic Ways to Get Found

1) Directory Listings

2) Advertising (I’m referring to Google Adwords or Google display ads)

3) Having a Social Media Presence (covered in post 4)

4) Inbound Links

5) Content Marketing

6) Organic SEO or search engine optimisation

Organic SEO encompasses all of the other tactics to a greater or lesser degree, so it will be our focus for this article.  And organic SEO is almost synonymous with, or at least shares many tactics of, content strategy itself.  In fact, one of the primary reasons to have a good content strategy is so that your digital business will get found, because the bottom line is without content, you will not get found.

The intersection of organic SEO, content strategy, and usability or user experience design is a sweet spot where you will get found, get customers, and make money.  We’re going to talk a lot about the keyword aspect of organic search engine optimization because it is a great way to focus in on the words and phrases that will best target your users and help them to find you. Getting found using organic SEO is all about search engines like Google, so it’s worthwhile to describe very briefly how Google works.

 

How does google work?

Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  In order to do this, they have what are called Search Spiders: these are little bits of computer code that “crawl” the Internet, scanning pages as they go.

Google has an algorithm that then ranks each and every page; giving it what Google calls “page rank”.  Page Rank is based on multiple factors that only Google really knows, but they are things like:

  • Does this read like real content or does it sound false or fake?
  • Are there certain words that are used enough times (2-7% of the time) so that we, the robotic spiders, can guess what this page is about?
  • Does anyone else on the Internet, especially sources that have a good page rank and therefore good reputation, link to this page?
  • Does this page load quickly?

Then, when a user searches for, say, “Content Strategy”, Google’s algorithm looks for all the pages that it ranked as top quality for the words “Content Strategy”, and it serves them up on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

The goal of getting found online is ultimately to be there on the first page of Google’s search results when people are searching for the kind of product or service you offer.  Very few people will ever look on the second page of Google, and in fact, very few people will ever venture beyond the first 3 results served.

 

Keyword Optimisation: the basics

To drive traffic and develop a relationship of trust with your customers, you really must create relevant, helpful content.  But optimising that content for keywords is an important and useful practice, because it will increase your visibility in search and it will also help you focus your content.  What this means is that you need to choose a word or short phrase that represents what you believe your target users might be typing into Google’s search box when they are searching for your product or service.  You need to imagine what words THEY would use.  Then, you need to make sure that those words comprise 2-7% of the text on the page you are optimising.  Every page on your website should be optimised for one keyword (or keyword phrase); this keyword should appear in the URL for the page, the page title, in the body copy of the page, even in any image descriptions on the page.

There are lots of simple places to look to figure out what keywords you might use to focus on in your blog posts, landing pages, and product pages.

Look on competitor websites and see what kinds of words they are using to describe products and services similar to yours

Listen to your customers: what words do they use to describe their problems, their solutions, and their needs?

Type your ideas into Google and see what alternatives appear as you type

Look at the bottom of the SERP or search engine results page; you will see further variations there

Each page should also have 4-6 secondary keyword variations, so as you are doing this research, try to group keywords and phrases and their close variations together on a spreadsheet so you have lots of options when it comes time to write your blog posts, landing pages, or other site copy, and try to include location as keywords if your product or service is local.  Imagine your website as a series of landing pages: every product page, every post, should be created and written with keywords in mind.

Keyword optimisation is something you should do on your website even if you are not blogging!

 

Inbound links

When we talk about inbound links, it’s really important to distinguish these links from the links that you might put on your website, between pages or linking out to other websites.  When we say inbound links we’re not talking about the links ON your pages, we’re talking about the links TO your pages, FROM other websites

Inbound links are as important as keyword optimisation as far as helping your pages to rank well for Google.  They are especially important if your conversion funnel is more weighted towards passive discovery rather than active discovery and they are critically important if your service is consultation, thought leadership, expertise, or education.

The easiest way to get inbound links is to submit your site to directories; while some directories cost money and therefore give you what is called a “no follow” link, they are still really important if you are a very active discovery type of business or to build your credibility as might be the case, for example, with being listed by your community’s Better Business Bureau.

However, if you are more of a passive discovery business where customers require multiple touch points before they make a buying decision, you need to use content to generate trust and develop the relationship, much in the way a traditional salesperson might do.  This is where Content Marketing in the form of blogging, white papers, report, eBooks, videos, or info graphics can serve double duty.  They can be keyword optimised to drive organic search traffic, but they also provide you with key pieces of content that can be leveraged to obtain inbound links from Influencers.

Influencer ‘Backlinks’

What is the ecosystem surrounding your product or service, the community?  Who in that ecosystem influences your customers’ buying decisions?  Making contact with these bloggers or businesses online and making them aware of content you might have that might interest their users is a great way to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with them, one in which they might link to your valuable content, giving you a valuable inbound link or ‘backlink’, and you will have access to their audience and may drive some of that traffic to your site.

 

Advertising

Google adwords can be an extremely inexpensive way to catapult your website onto the front page of Google in the form of an ad.  Paying for advertising will not improve your website’s organic search ranking, but it will help you get your brand in front of consumers while you build your content marketing bench strength, and it is an excellent research tool, enabling you to really finesse your keywords and see very clearly what words to drive traffic and conversions.  You need to figure out the balance between advertising spend, which can be very low, and organic spend.  To do a good adwords campaign, you need continuity between your keywords, ads, and landing pages, so there is no way around having good, focused content on your website, but sometimes one really good ad & landing page can drive more traffic than a whole bunch of blog posts, so it can be a good idea to advertise early in your content marking lifecycle so you can drive immediate traffic while you build you bank of landing pages.

While there are no hard and fast rules, the 70/10/10/10 rule outlined in this chart can help you to prioritise your efforts:

MyFindabilityTacticsMatrix

On this chart, I’m assuming that active discovery means your users need very few touch points with your brand before they buy, whereas passive discovery means they need more touch points  before they buy.  If you need a refresher on active vs. passive discovery, have another read of last month’s post in this series.  You can use the chart above to prioritise you SEO efforts behind specific tactics that will make the biggest difference, the most efficiently.

 

What we haven’t covered

This series is about content strategy, but when it comes to very thorough SEO, there are issues that impact on your ability to get found that are more technical in nature.  The easiest and most important one to address is the speed of your webiste.  Your pages should never take more than a couple of seconds to load.  The bottom line for SEO is that if your site is reasonably fast and you have authentic, focused content, you have a great base on which to build your SEO.

Next month, the last in this series, we’ll cover Content itself: what are the options in how you can most effectively and inexpensively generate the kind of content marketing that will move your digital business into the spotlight.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

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