0:00
Sapir Segal
Welcome everyone and thank you so much for joining us on today's webinar titled Decoding the Facebook Algorithm. What happened? What does it mean for B2B marketers, and what could happen next? I'm Sapir Segal, the director of marketing here at Oktopost, and I'm super excited to be joined by Ethan Chinofsky, who's the director of corporate marketing at simlweb. Thank you for joining us.
0:21
Ethan Chernofsky
Ethan Sapir, thank you so much for having me.
0:25
Sapir Segal
Now, just to give you guys a sense of what this webinar will be about, first we'll explore Facebook's most recent changes to its newsfeed algorithm to try and better understand how it all works today. Then Ethan and I will share Oktopost and SimilarWeb's latest findings on how these changes affect you and your best practices as B2B marketers. And next, we'll offer some of our future predictions on what could happen next, along with actionable advice to try and help you guys win back your Facebook reach and engagement. And finally, of course, we'll end with a Q and A session and if you do have any questions, feel free to submit them on the right hand side of your screen inside the GoToWebinar and we'll make sure to address them at the end of the session. Just quickly, before we get started, I want to run a quick poll and just to try and better understand what's your current attitude towards Facebook as a B2B marketing channel? Do you think that it's dead in terms of organic reach? Perhaps you think it's an up and coming network? Do you think it's good for brand awareness and not lead generation? Maybe you think it's only good if you pay for ads or if it's not relevant to you because you're not a B2B marketer, then feel free to select that option. I'm just going to close the poll and let's share those answers. I guess that's quite interesting. We see that the majority of our listeners today have selected option number three, which is Facebook is good for brand awareness, not lead generation. And also we're seeing that a big majority is thinking that Facebook is only good if you're paying for ads. And I guess that option is kind of expected that one because as we're seeing that organic reaches dropping, a lot of people are thinking that they need to now kind of shift to the pay to play model. What are your thoughts, Ethan?
2:09
Ethan Chernofsky
So, I mean, I think I'd have a bit of a combination there The Facebook is good for brand awareness, not legion for the moment. I think it's been a, it's an effective tool tool for that. But I mean, interestingly, there's a part of me that thinks the Facebook is an up and coming network is as strange as that sounds. That's very interesting for reasons we'll get into later, just because of the expansiveness of what that ecosystem looks like.
2:35
Sapir Segal
Yeah, completely agree. Right, so let's move on and I want to start by sharing a recent personal experience of mine. So I recently had the pleasure of meeting Kip Bodna who is HubSpot CMO and he gave a meet up here in Tel Aviv about the future of, of engagement, marketing and the role of marketers in society today. And when he described the role of marketers today, he said, and he actually used these exact words, marketers have a tendency to fuck things up greatly. And to be honest, at first I was pretty shocked because that's a very bold statement to make. But then I thought to myself, you know what, this guy's right. Just take email as an example. So email used to be this great utility that made our lives so much easier since the inception of direct mail, but now it's kind of like email is used for and as another spam tool. And email in a way can be very laborious and no one has the patience of reading through long, tedious emails. And to be honest, when I thought about it, and as Kip suggests, it's all because marketers have taken email to the extreme. They've abused the channel, this great marketing channel for one way communication. Now if you take Kip's way of thinking, I personally thought that it was very relevant. His whole perception of email marketing can easily be applied to Facebook and perhaps to all social channels. So if you think about the first time that you opened your Facebook account, so I remember I first signed up in 2009, maybe for you was earlier than that. I think it was just a whole different world out there. I mean it had its flaws visually, but it was truly about connecting between friends and family members. Now if you fast forward to today in 2018 and I'm sure you can all agree that Facebook feeds are just crowded with ads and posts from publishers and marketers. And for some companies, I think that Facebook has become a supplement to their own website. And in a way they feel this need to publish all of their content without properly planning their promotional strategy. Now in comes January 2018 and Facebook finally decided to do something about the way it organizes content in our newsfeed and to try and better determine what to show us at the top of the newsfeed and even with our content that it deems as less relevant and less interesting for us. I want to quote Adam Mosseri, who's the VP Product Management in Facebook, and he said there's more and more content that we have to consume, but only so much time to do that. So our role is to help people connect with the stories that matter to them most. And essentially what Adam here is saying is that Facebook is trying to redesign a friendly and more user centric platform, which in a way shifts its focus from measuring how much time people spend on Facebook and how much time they're spending on just consuming content to help people genuinely communicate with others and how they build these conversations and relationships on Facebook. Now, taking this to a more technical level, what Mosseri is referring to here is a ranking algorithm. So if you think about a newsfeed like a clean slate. So when you first sign up, your newsfeed is completely empty. But as time goes by, you start friending and connecting with friends and family members and publishers, and suddenly you'll get tons of content published by all of your connections. And now Facebook's immediate role is to try to decide and to analyze what to show you at the top of your newsfeed as soon as you open it. And to do that, Facebook actually takes into consideration several signals, as you can see in the slide, and it uses these signals to analyze and inf how much users are interested in your story. So, for example, one signal is who posted the content? Was that a family member, a friend, a publisher? Another signal is when it was posted, was it this morning? Two days ago? Just because something was posted this morning, as you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be at the top of your newsfeed. Another signal is the type of content itself. So is it an image, Video, text only? What's the format? And most importantly, Facebook looks at interactions with the post. So how are your audiences actually engaging with the content? Are they like, are they sharing, commenting, reacting? And essentially, this is the most important signal that we're also going to discuss in more detail further on. Based on these signals, Facebook gives a relevancy score to determine how likely you are to care about a story and genuinely be interested in it. Here are some examples that I just took from my feed this morning. There is, as you can see, a photo on the left from my best friend who just got engaged, a dog video shared by my aunt, and then There's a sponsored post by some brand that I didn't even know I followed. Now, what Facebook will do is it orders these stories, these content stories based on how relevant it thinks they are for me. And the minute I start engaging with them, the higher it's going to rank in my newsfeed. And this is an ongoing algorithm just constantly calculating and analyzing what to show me every time I refresh my feed. Now, as I said earlier, sometimes it's really not about your relationship with the person or with the company. It's really what Facebook most cares about is the level of interaction with that content and how much it inspires this so called back and forth communication. And when it comes to interactions and what Facebook coined as meaningful interactions, Facebook highly favors and prioritizes conversations that trigger or facilitate these active involvement on behalf of the users. So unlike these passive interactions of someone simply liking or clicking a post or they're hovering it, or they're just watching the video, this by nature is extremely passive. It doesn't require a lot of effort. But when, when we look at active participation like comments, reactions, sharing content via messenger or the group, or when you're replying to multiple comments, or when you're engaging with a brand post shared by a friend, this Facebook considers a lot more meaningful and therefore it prioritizes it and will show it higher on the newsfeed. We'll give it a much higher score. That's kind of a general overview of how the Facebook algorithm works. But I think the real question that Ethan and I were really curious to answer is what, what do all of these changes mean for B2B marketers? How, how has it affected your reach and engagement and content strategy? And I want to kind of pass the torch now to Ethan who's going to share with us some great insights from the SimilarWeb platform and the data that he's gathered. So Ethan, onto you.
8:58
Ethan Chernofsky
So thanks so much, Sapir. So I think the first thing we always do at SimilarWeb is we want to understand the wider trend and see what's happening with any, any digital entity. And the first thing you notice whenever you're looking at Facebook, especially in the last few years, is that there is this general downward trend. And what you're seeing in front of you is traffic to Facebook desktop and mobile web from January 2017 to April of 2018. There's two things that are really clear. One, there is a very distinct decline in traffic. And two, the mobile web, which is the light blue at the top, is a really distinct element of that downward trend. And so a lot of the discussion that's been centering around Facebook of late has been, well, why is this happening and what does it mean? And does it mean that the platform is losing value overall? And therefore, this is why the changes are happening to the platform, to make it more accessible. But I think when you go those levels deeper, you see something very, very different. So the real important thing to take a look at here is that the primary source of the decline is coming from mobile web. And so there's two ways to look at this. The first is kind of that simplistic Facebook is declining. And the second, and a far more kind of sophisticated perspective on this is, well, what's happening on mobile that is changing kind of the way we engage with the platform. And for us, one of the things that we saw and we've seen through our data is that this isn't an issue of Facebook the company weakening. It's an issue of Facebook the company diversifying and becoming a more expansive entity that is more an ecosystem than any single platform. And so you look at something like Instagram being downloaded on nearly 50% of Android devices in the United States, Facebook messenger or WhatsApp being the number one messaging platform in 168 countries worldwide, and what you're seeing is the reason people aren't engaging with facebook.com on mobile web is because they're finding a lot more of the functionality in the wider Facebook ecosystem and world of apps. And that speaks to. It's not a downward trend of the overall ecosystem. It's a changing nature of where users are being active and how they're engaging with a wider range of tools to accomplish tasks that used to be in one specific platform.
11:27
Sapir Segal
That's very interesting. Thanks, Ethan. And if I had to sort of wrap up, what you're saying is that regardless of the newsfeed algorithm change, Facebook has kind of. It's not that it's been gaining less traction as a platform, it's that it's been expanding to various other tools that Facebook now owns. And these are also gaining a lot more traction. So it's not Facebook.com, it's everything that Facebook encompasses now. What we want to look at now is what were Facebook's predictions in terms of the newsfeed algorithm announcement, and what did they predict for marketers and what did they think the market should be saying, essentially? So these were sort of the top four predictions that Facebook announced. The first one was that we're generally going to see a declining reach video watch time and referral traffic. But this is going to vary according to how engaging your content is and how your content is generating these so called meaningful interactions. So if your content is highly engaging, if it's generating, generating those meaningful interactions, your brand is obviously going to experience less of an impact in terms of the declining reach. However, if your content isn't engaging, if it's not generating those interactions, then obviously you can expect to see less engagement and less, less of that reach. To really determine whether those findings are correlating with what B2B marketers are doing and what they're experiencing on the Facebook platform itself, we looked at data inside Octoparse, inside the social networks among our top B2B clients, and we examined their sharing volumes, their reach, their engagement from the same time frame in 2017-2018. So right before and after the Facebook algorithm announcement, just to see what's changed. Now, the first finding that was quite foreseeable, I think to Ethan and I, is that B2B marketers have significantly increased the amount of content published to Facebook. So on average we saw that they published 4,48% more content from 2017 to 2018. So if, let's say they were publishing 100 posts in the month of, in a month in 2017, in 2018, they published 148 posts in the exact same period. But the thing is, in an ideal world, right, the 48% increase in posts would have offset the decrease in reach. But unfortunately we actually found, and this is the bad news, is that the power of the reach was much greater than the power of the post because our data shows that the reach actually decreased by 66% from 2017. So that's not a very good finding. And then if we look at the engagement rate and what the types of engagement that B2B marketers are experiencing on Facebook since the algorithm change, we see another very surprising finding is that across the board there has been a decline, a significant decline in engagement. So shares decreased by 75%, link clicks by 26% and likes also by 53%. What's interesting is that contrary to our expectations, the engagement rate decreased at a much more dramatic rate than the reach. So instead of them decreasing in parallel, we see that engagement is decreasing at a much more dramatic rate. This kind of raises the following question. So why is it that when our audience is finally exposed to our content, when the reach is no longer an issue and they're seeing our content, why is it that they're suddenly less engaged with it? And I think also correct me if I'm wrong, Ethan, but I think that there's a very simple explanation for this. So the minute that you start posting more content, investing more time in just increasing that volume, then it's only natural that the quality may be compromised or even degraded. And I think we see this across all channels. If you start sending out more emails, publishing more ads, whatever it may be, obviously it's only natural that we're going to see a decrease in the quality.
15:16
Ethan Chernofsky
I think it comes back to what you were mentioning earlier with email as a channel. I think as marketers, we have to realize that every one of the channels we're operating within has changing dynamics with Facebook or with email. There's been this desire to maybe increase the velocity at which we're producing content and distributing it, but it's not going to help. And so I think always returning to that core element of what am I trying to gain out of the platform, what are my goals for each post? And to make sure that it's not just trying to overcompensate by increasing the number of posts, but really focusing on the fundamentals of how do I make sure each thing accomplishes what I want it to do and then adjust the strategy and balance accordingly as opposed to trying to kind of force the issue with just increasing the number of posts that you're putting out.
16:08
Sapir Segal
Right. I agree. I think it's about growing that level of sophistication with your content. And it's not just about focusing on what makes content popular or attention grabbing or viral worthy, but about what makes your content personal and conversation worthy and generating those really meaningful engagement. Moving forward, looking at the data that we've just examined, and having experimented with different types of content on Facebook, we're now going to try and offer some predictions on what we think could Happen Next, how B2B marketers can try and adjust their Facebook strategy to really stay effective. So, Ethan, I believe that the question on everyone's mind today right now is will Facebook die? Is it even going to be relevant for us to continue investing our content resources and our manpower on this channel?
16:57
Ethan Chernofsky
So I think this was the kind of the question that's been going on in the minds of many companies for a long time. And you think you think of something like the publishing space with companies like Mashable, which made a very notable pivot to video and really focused, put all their eggs in the Facebook basket and then by doing so, watch their valuation plummet from $250 million to $50 million to a $50 million exit. And so fire sale, more aptly put. And so the first thing you always want to check is, is this channel even worth investing? As this was only increased with the algorithm change in January and then the Cambridge Analytica scandal and all the kind of the follow up to the most recent US Election. But what we're seeing is it is a stable entity and that even the conversations against Facebook are largely happening on Facebook, and that this isn't a channel that's going anywhere. And that while the algorithms and some of the intricacies of how to maximize the platform are going to change, the platform itself is going to be a core focus or should be a core focus for marketers in an ongoing way. And as opposed to trying to figure out how to pivot away from it or move all of your eggs into different baskets and move away, it's much more about what we were talking about earlier, which is how do you drive an increasing sophistication in your strategy so that you can maximize the nuanced landscape of Facebook?
18:26
Sapir Segal
Yeah, I completely agree. And it's interesting you say, and if I have to kind of summarize in a few few words, the answer, guys, is no, Facebook is not dying. It's here to stay, at least in the near future. And now that we've established that, Ethan, I want to ask you, what advice would you give B2B marketers who are really looking now to prioritize engagement with content on Facebook? And I know SimilarWeb has been doing some great stuff with video on Facebook. Is that working? Would you recommend for B2B marketers now to shift their focus to videos? And would it be videos or live videos? What's your advice on this?
19:07
Ethan Chernofsky
You know, for us, we've been. We put a heavy emphasis on video in the last six months. And I think, look, there is an element. We are in a period where, at least for the short term, Facebook is not going to be the most effective channel for lead generation. But that doesn't mean you're not getting value there. So we find that our video can do a lot in terms of, you know, just establishing our brand and giving more touch points in terms of helping our HR efforts, in terms of boosting kind of internal feeling about the company and making sure that even the people who are within our networks are seeing what we're doing. Yes, we're continuing very much full steam ahead on the platform. We are just changing the things that we expect to see from Facebook and adjusting our expectations accordingly.
19:55
Sapir Segal
Yeah. And I also just want to add, regarding Videos. I think that a lot of times we're seeing this, a lot of buzz around video marketing and a lot of marketers think that video is almost like this magic bullet and that it's going to solve all the challenges. But I think it's just like any type of content. It's not about creating video for the sake of creating video. Otherwise Facebook is just going to treat it like any other post. It really needs to be meaningful in order to be prioritized. And as you can see guys, I've shared an example from HubSpot that I think personally does a great, great job with all content marketing, but also with, with video marketing on Facebook. And they're a good example here for two main reasons. First, their content, their video content is always very seasonal, very topical and they also localize it so people really want to talk about it and it causes back and forth communication. And secondly, they always post it natively to Facebook. And as we know, Facebook doesn't want people to leave that its platform. So directing your, your audience to other sites, back to your website, not the best way to keep your audience engaged and to increase that reach on Facebook. Another way that I want to discuss about how you can approach the Facebook algorithm change is by trying to adapt your lead generation methods to the way that Facebook is directing traffic. So traditionally B2B marketers would post a link from their website content to Facebook that would obviously drive people to a web form to grow their lead database. But again, with Facebook wanting to keep the traffic on their platform, you can no longer rely on Facebook to direct traffic elsewhere. So you need to really communicate your message right away within the Facebook ecosystem. And actually it's not that complicated. It's not as complicated as it sounds because Facebook is constantly introducing new entry points, some are old that are now gaining a bit more traction that not only make it easier for your prospects to register and sign up to your content, but also for the company to garner leads. So one method that we've actually been experimenting a lot lately has been with lead ads. So instead of directing people to your landing page, lead ads is just a pop up that's very native and seamless to mobile and allows people to register to that piece of content directly within Facebook. Now what we're saying here is not that you should just now go and shift your whole model to pay to play, but if you are looking to boost your organic reach, there are other simple methods which Ethan, I'm going to let you elaborate on.
22:29
Ethan Chernofsky
So I think kind of the first one is one that we feel really strong about and it's recognizing the wider benefits of every channel. So for us, we know that HR is a huge part and we know that if we produce good content and that content is shared even just by our employees who are living in the regions where we're hiring, then we're getting a really personal way of outreach and spreading and showing the environment to the types of people we're trying to reach. So there's a lot of value there. Community is really valuable customer support. One of the real rising trends is doing more things within a single platform. So, you know, companies like HubSpot are doing not only advertising on Facebook, they are then bringing you in to have a conversation with you and try to sell to you on Facebook and then they're providing you support on Facebook. So the more things you can do in Channel, the more Facebook is going to kind of upgrade what the reach that you have because you're keeping it all within that same world. And so there's a huge benefit to expanding the way that you view the platform and what you can do there, with one major caveat being recognizing where your segment is. So HubSpot touches very heavily on that kind of SMB to large SMB to smaller mid sized companies as a market. And so there's still a tremendous amount of reach to be gained through that channel. Whereas if you're more on the enterprise side, it might be other channels that you need to be utilizing. But I think one of the big things, and this will lead nicely into the second point, is you can't get out of Facebook because what happens then is you end up missing wider trends in the industry. And when Facebook kind of swings back towards providing some of the values that it might have six months ago, a year ago, etc. And even more than that, it's recognizing that we live not just on Facebook.com, but in a Facebook universe. So Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook all create this cohesive ecosystem that many users are living within. And the ability to understand that wider context is fundamental. Because if you can create a seamless experience through all of those platforms within that one wider ecosystem, you're going to see a lot of success. And there's a lot of brands who are using even big B2B brands, using Instagram incredibly effectively as a brand awareness tool, leveraging messenger as a way to communicate with users and to engage in customer support and to do that all in channel. So from our perspective, there is the brand awareness element and that's always going to be there. But the wider we can think about Facebook, the more values we can determine how to gain, is going to be a huge step moving forward. And I think the most important element for us is it's never something that we're going to say, hey, we just got to leave this aside. It's not a. It's not a great B2B platform, because just as there were, you know, there were there, we might not necessarily be in the greatest peak of all time of what Facebook can do for a B2B marketing strategy that could turn in a month. And losing that direct contact is going to be really problematic because one of the things we showed was in January, Facebook announced their algorithm change. However, many of the changes have been felt 6, 9, 12 months before that. Being involved in these platforms, even if it's not your go to channel for every element of your marketing strategy, is important just so that you are really having your toe in the water feeling the changes so you're in a position to take advantage of every turn and trend upwards that may come about.
26:17
Sapir Segal
Yeah, thanks, Ethan. Those are some really great points. And I also want to add just quickly that employee advocacy, if you're really looking now to amplify your brand messaging and reach, then employee advocacy is just another way to do that. So, interestingly enough, our data actually shows from Oktopost that there's been an upward trend in companies that have been deploying employee advocacy across the company to sales and marketing teams and HR teams even, and having them share the content to their personal social networks, including Facebook. And from the numbers that we pulled from Oktopost, we see that this has been having a dramatically positive effect. So if we see in 2017 that content shared by advocates generated 6.75 times more engagement than the content shared from the official company profiles in 2018, we actually see, we see a 2.24% increase in the engagement rate from the audience network of advocates. So there's definitely a shift in engagement from companies to employees. And I think from our perspective at octoprose, is that if Facebook is all about prioritizing engagement between people, then it might be smart to start thinking about how you can expand your audience territories to encompass employee advocacy and to try and mobilize some employees and get them to amplify a reach by sharing that content to their personal networks. That's all the time that we have for questions today. I'd like to thank Ethan once again for joining us and for sharing all of those wonderful answers and insights directly from SimilarWeb. It's been a pleasure planning and co hosting this webinar with you and to our audience. Thank you again. We hope that we managed to offer you guys some practical tips and insights on how you can adopt Facebook, or at least even try to make you feel slightly more optimistic about Facebook as a B2B marketing tool. Now, if you do want to hear more about Octopar social media management or employee advocacy platform, please feel free to contact me directly. Or if you'd like to learn more about SimilarWeb's market intelligence software, you can use the email address listed on the webinar slide.
