Back in October, Derek Duncan shared on this blog about the changes coming to Facebook’s news feed and how they would impact school PR.
At the time, we learned that the news feed’s algorithm would start prioritizing content that people care about, so it was more important than ever to post relevant content.
This week, Facebook told us that the news feed will soon prioritize content from users’ friends and family over public posts from pages like the ones we use to communicate for our schools.
According to Facebook’s release,
As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.
Here are my plans for responding to this shift in Facebook’s priorities:
- Monitor my district page’s insights to see how the algorithm changes affect us.
- Continue to try to post the kind of content to which our district’s patrons respond. This will require us to be creative without trying to game this system with gimmicks.
- If we see a dramatic drop in reach, evaluate whether Facebook is still a useful tactical tool to help us achieve our strategic communication goals.
How do you plan to respond?
NSPRA: Social School Public Relations 
You nailed it. We have to be relevant and engaging, as well as frequent.
Thanks, Jack!
Agreed. You nailed it! This was very well-done!
It’s frustrating because as a user of Facebook, I constantly have to manually visit pages that I’ve liked because their posts don’t show up in my news feed. The algorithm is broken. Further, not every piece of important, relevant or interesting information will garner conversation or the need to share. But if Facebook wants brands to stop using it’s platform, this is a good start toward that push.
Good point. It definitely seems that Mark Zuckerberg’s message alluded to not worrying about the needs of organizations using their pages. As I mentioned, I plan to evaluate whether Facebook is still valuable as a tool after this change.
Great information and analysis – thank you for sharing! We will no longer post “courtesy” items for groups like a fundraiser that affects one school on Facebook. We will be using Twitter and Instagram for those and certainly be more selective with our FB content as a result of this change.
Good idea, Mary! These muddied our message anyway (see @kristinmagette‘s post about contests). This might be an opportunity in disguise.
We have posted information to our pages on how followers can try and help make sure our posts are showing in their feed. In addition, I agree with Nicole in monitoring our posts and analytics and making sure we are being relevant and creative in our posts so that people want to see the content. I am looking at doing a survey of parents (maybe in the fall or winter of 2018) to see if Facebook is still a way for them to get information and seeing if they are still seeing our posts. Our community is not on Twitter or Instagram (in terms of parents) so getting information from them will be critical if we need to move in another direction.
Ola
Good share.
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I would like to see more posts like this
Thanks