I recently attended a workshop on the changes Facebook and Instagram will be making, and in some cases, have made, to their policies and community guidelines. I thought I’d detail some of the higher level ones here as I believe it makes some interesting reading. Bear in mind this was given by a noted expert in marketing and I’m only the messenger 😊

I think we already all know that both social networks are trying to encourage spend on their respective platforms and especially when it comes to business. Being a writer is a business and as such, we can’t decry the fact that social media platforms would like to get paid something for ‘advertising’ out to their members in the public arena while we try and sell our goods. That makes business sense and something people need to accept in terms of their promotional costing.

We can’t get everything for free and to be naïve and think we can is where an author is going to struggle.

These are the salient points I took away with me during this seminar:

Instagram

• The focus will be on removing low quality posts. If they see a post isn’t working, doesn’t generate interaction and comments, then they will be supressing them
• They will be removing the Explore and Hashtag sections, which will reduce discoverability. I understand this will be rested and rolled out towards the end of 2019.
• They will begin to focus on content not how many likes a post has. There is talk about them removing the facility for someone to see how many likes a post has, and only the Admin will be able to see this going forward.
• IG says it wishes to prioritise content based on what THEY believe people want to see.

Facebook

• When someone leaves a group, they will be given the option to remove all their content posted in that group. It will therefore reduce the post content of the group as a whole if people choose to do this.
• There will now be notifications when a non-compliant post is tagged (I thought this already happened) but apparently this will be changing, I’m not 100% sure how exactly.
• Groups will be closed if a group has too many violations, but this hasn’t been quantified yet as far as I know.
• One of the statistics given was pretty startling ad depressing. It’s estimated this will reduce organic reach (a post done with no advertising, boosting etc) to 6.5 % for the average group. This means if you have a group with 1000 people, only 65 people are likely to see your posts going forward.
• Certain posts on a Business Page will be de-prioritised if they are low quality, low interaction and will therefore not appear in newsfeeds.
• Interesting factor – if you actually choose to Love, Wow, Sad a page, these interactions have more impact than a simple Like, which can simply be a case of people automatically Liking a post without even reading it. But if you take that extra second to click on another icon, that will count more.

I have more to share with you but that’s for another post. There’s too much going to do in one shot. I hope some of this has helped shed some light on future changes.

Happy writing!!