Facebook is launching a new update to the algorithm that governs its News Feed, the social media network has announced on its blog. Going forward, the company will rank stories posted by users’ friends even higher, following a similar update the company made last April.
What does this mean for travel agents? According to Facebook, the move could see reach and referral traffic fall for third-party brand pages. As a result, agencies who market on Facebook through an official brand page could see their posts reach fewer people as those posts fall in the Newsfeed ranking versus posts from clients’ friends. For agents who market themselves through a personal Facebook account, the impact is less clear.
The impact will also depend on the type of audience a brand page attracts, Facebook said. Pages that see most of their referral traffic directly from their own posts could be most effected, while pages that draw a lot of traffic from other people sharing, liking and commenting on their posts will be less affected, as those shares, likes and comments could be spread as coming from a users’ friends, instead of a brand page. We’ve written before about how engagement is key to building reach on Facebook, and this update will do little to change that. The more users engage with an agency’s posts, the more Facebook could see the conversation around those posts as the sort of personal interactions this update is designed to encourage.
Additionally, Facebook maintains a list of publishing best practices that can help agents improve their posts.
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