- Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel here,
and we're here for another Q & A Thursdays.
I'm accompanied by Adam from Viewership,
and this week's question is...
- I've been seeing a ton of questions
about the new Facebook algorithm,
and for those of you who don't know much about this,
this is something that Facebook has been rolling out
over the past couple months, which basically
Facebook is changing from a site where
they're gonna be sharing a lot of links,
and things like that, to more of a conversation.
A lot of the websites and Facebook pages
that are sharing links to blogs and things like that,
that's actually getting downgraded on the news feed.
I wanted to hear what Neil's thoughts are
on the future of Facebook and where you see all this going.
- Whether Facebook continually does
more algorithm updates, which I believe they will,
and you guys are gonna continually
get crushed on how much traffic.
What I found is, the more engagement you get
in general on Facebook, and then when you
share a link, you're better off.
I found this out when we started doing videos.
You guys are watching this video right here,
and I posted the video on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube,
and the list keeps going on and on.
What I found was, as I create content that's more engaging,
like video content, I put it on Facebook, my reach goes up,
and then when I share links, the links do better.
So if I share tons of videos on a daily basis,
they continually boost my overall page's performance,
and then when I share links, I'm much better off.
On the flip side, I used to just only share links,
day after day after day, and when I only shared the links,
my reach would go down, even if the post was amazing
and it would go viral on other social networks,
and I know typically that post would have done well
on Facebook as well, it doesn't do that well.
The reason being is, my overall page score on Facebook
has just gone down, and Facebook's like well your fans
aren't really engaging, so even if you share amazing content
today, but if they didn't engage from the last month,
and you kept sharing them information,
then your content's not really gonna show up
in their news feed because Facebook's like
hey users don't care to engage.
If you share new content, we don't really care
because your users don't like it.
So instead of posting links, what you need to do
is redo your strategy.
Start creating conversations, like text-based messages
and asking people questions.
You mentioned in the algorithm, what do they want to do,
they want to create more...
- Conversation. - That's right.
- And they want long conversations.
Long comments from users, which is tough, right?
To get your audience to have a deep, thoughtful
conversation about, especially business,
it could be tricky, I think.
- And you've done really well with getting long comments,
specifically from videos.
What's the tactics that you use to get more longer,
engaged comments from social media?
- I think the key is you look at conversations online
as conversations offline. If you just ask very surface-level
conversations, surface-level questions, you're gonna get
surface-level answers, right?
If I just go to Neil, and I see him for the beginning
of the day, I say, "How's your day going?"
He's gonna say, "Good. How about you?" Boring, right?
If I ask Neil, "What's really been going on
in the past month of your life that I don't know about?"
Something a little bit deeper, or talk about something
that I know that he's interested in.
I know Neil doesn't like to share his personal life
too much, so I won't get into that, but if I ask something
a little bit deeper, what am I gonna get?
I'm gonna get a nice, long, five, 10 minute response
from Neil, which is awesome.
Think of it the same way with the video content,
and ask, just try to go one surface-level deeper,
and you'll get much better conversation.
- Now that you got the engagement going,
what you want to do is respond to every single comment.
As people comment, you have to respond to them.
If you don't respond to them, they're not gonna
keep coming back and writing more comments,
and there's a huge difference.
We've tested this out on Facebook,
and what we found is, every time that we respond
to a comment, we get a bit more than 20% more comments.
If we don't respond to any comments, people are like,
oh well this page is dead.
I wish it was where you get double or triple
the amount of comments by responding.
I'm excluding our own comments, like me responding back.
In general though, 20 plus per cent more comments
by just responding, that's great. There's more engagement.
Once you build up your fan page by creating videos,
questions, engaging, putting pictures of your family,
sharing your personal life, even though I hate that.
- We'll get him to do it soon. Trust me.
- Eventually.
At that point, then mix in links to your website,
and when you're putting in links from your website,
just don't share the link and a thumbnail,
write a paragraph or a sentence above.
I know a lot of times, I even miss this step
because I'm just busy, and I'm on the road,
but there's no excuse, even I don't have one,
because you can schedule in advance,
and by writing something that's engaging
or controversial, you'll get way more likes,
comments, clicks, and that's what it really takes
to do better on Facebook, and you can't be sharing
links all of the time. You need to mix it up.
I would say roughly 70 plus per cent of the content
that you put on Facebook or your fan page these days
needs to be questions, conversational, video.
You can even put in audio and have a still image,
because some people like listening to audio,
like if you have a podcast.
Record the podcast from a video perspective,
or what you could just do is put a still image
and get more engagement that way as well.
- Definitely, and one thing I've also found
with Facebook ads, my other company would spend
anywhere from five to 10 thousand dollars a month
on just ads, but if you promote just text ad,
where you're not promoting anything, you just ask
a question, and you can actually promote that,
then you're gonna get all these comments from your fans,
and you're gonna, just like that, boost your engagement
on your page.
- That's a good point. One strategy that we use
internally is we'll promote our content just to our
fans, and only our fans, because as Adam mentioned,
once you get them to reengage, what that does is
Facebook says oh more percentage of your fan base,
so let's say three per cent of your fans engaged before,
now they'll be like oh, even though it's through
a paid ad, they'll be like oh wow, now it's six per cent
of your fans that are engaging, so when you stop
the paid ads, and then you do a post,
a lot more of those people were already engaging,
they'll come back, and then Facebook will be like
oh yeah this is great. Let's push up your posts,
your content, links to your site.
It all makes sense because
your community engagement is great.
It's not about having a lot of fans of Facebook.
It's about having a small amount
but having them super engaged.
That's the key to doing well on Facebook.
- Great. So there we have it.
In the next video, if you have any other questions
about Facebook, about social media,
please leave a comment below.
We are reading every single one of them. And Neil...
- Like. Share. Let other people know about it
if you like the content, and thank you guys
for listening. Anytime you guys have questions,
even if it doesn't get answered
in the weekly Q & A Thursday video,
leave a comment. I promise I'll respond.
It may take me some time because the comment count
is increasing, but I really do enjoy
helping you out, and so does Adam.
- Absolutely. Speak to you guys soon. Bye.