It’s vital to keep up with current social media trends. In addition to things like niche platforms and personalization, another trend that might impact your social media strategy is regular algorithm changes. These updates can significantly impact how your followers share and view content. This, in turn, affects your engagement, reach, and overall effectiveness on various platforms. Wondering how algorithm changes impact your social media strategy? Let’s explore.
How Do Social Media Algorithms Work?
Social media algorithms are systems used by platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), and LinkedIn to decide what shows up in users’ feeds. These algorithms look at user behavior, content type, and engagement rates to provide a personalized experience to each user.
Major Algorithm Changes and Their Impacts
Facebook has made many algorithm changes over the years, directly impacting how businesses and influencers approach their social media strategies. For instance, in 2018, Facebook started prioritizing content from friends and family over pages and businesses.
While this change sought to up convos between people, it caused a 52% decrease in organic reach for business pages. If you’re a business that relies on reach to promote your products, you have to adapt quickly in this situation. How, though? A couple of options include increasing your investment in Facebook Ads and/or focusing on creating content that sparks comments and shares to boost visibility.
Instagram’s algorithm changes are usually more subtle but equally impactful. In 2016, Instagram moved from a chronological feed to one that’s engagement-based. This meant users were likelier to see posts with higher engagement (likes, comments, shares). Later, in 2019, Instagram started experimenting with hiding likes to focus on content quality over popularity metrics.
A Quintly study showed that users were 70% more likely to see highly engaged Instagram posts. Thus, influencers and brands shifted their focus to creating high-quality, engaging content. For example, a fashion brand might invest more in professional photography and user-generated content to increase engagement and remain visible in people’s feeds.
Twitter (X)
Twitter’s algorithm changes aim to show users the most relevant and engaging tweets first rather than just the latest ones. They’ve toyed with features like “While you were away” and the option to switch between top tweets and latest tweets.
How did this all fare? Twitter reported engagement with top tweets surpassed chronological timelines by 26%. So, ensure your tweets are engaging and timely to appear in the top tweets section. This might involve using more interactive content like multimedia and interactive polls to boost engagement.
On LinkedIn, the algorithm prioritizes professional relevance by highlighting content that’s likely to benefit a user’s career. They updated their algo in 2020 to reduce the dominance of top influencers and give more visibility to niche professionals.
LinkedIn’s algorithm values content that sparks conversations. LinkedIn’s engineering blog notes that posts with 50-100 comments are more likely to go viral. So, capitalize on this by sharing industry updates and actively engaging with comments to enhance visibility and interaction.
How to Adapt Your Social Media Strategy
With all this in mind, how do you ensure you create the most actionable content for each channel? The most important place to start is by keeping track of algorithm updates. Subscribe to relevant blogs, industry experts, and news outlets.
Engagement is always in style, so base your content creation around what you think will encourage interactions. Ask questions, create polls, and use calls to action to increase comments, likes, and shares.
It’s also important to remember to use a mix of content types (videos, images, text) to cater to different preferences and increase the chances of engagement. Everything should tie into your branding and look professional, though. This means investing in high-quality visuals, videos, and well-written posts.
When organic reach becomes more difficult to achieve, consider Meta ad strategies where you can reach your specific audience more effectively. And whether you’re pursuing organic or paid social media efforts, review your analytics regularly. This will help you understand what types of content perform best, and you can use that info to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Conclusion
Algorithm changes are an inevitable part of the social media world. However, you can continue to reach and engage your audience effectively when you keep up with them and adapt to the changes. Remember, success on social media requires flexibility and a willingness to evolve with the platforms you use.