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If you’re creating or fine tuning your online brand in 2019, it’s crucial to understand how social media algorithms impact your metrics for you to exploit your content marketing plan. You need your content to be widely viewed and shared around the marketplace, but sometimes, it can be a challenge to achieve that reach and visibility. In this article, we will help guide you through the complex nature of social media algorithms.

Building Successful Content

Before launching your content online, you must ensure it is crafted to succeed. Be aware of several key areas.

The first is engagement. Your visitors should immediately want to share your content. Crafting posts and tweets in a way that they are thought-provoking, interesting, or humorous means that your followers are more likely to share them. You need to understand how Facebook prioritizes content that produces interactions between family and friends. It is crucial for you to create content people will want to share.

The second is relevancy, which is obviously tied closely to engagement. If the content is irrelevant to the reader, they move on. In fact, irrelevant content is worse than no content. You want the reader to read more and remain true to the brand.

The third are is timeliness. Because social media content is an endless stream of current information, knowing when to share is important. This takes research into which day of the week and what time of day your audience checks their social media feeds. This can be the difference between high engagement numbers or drowning in a sea of internet chatter.

Lastly, the time a visitor spends reading your content will impact how the social media algorithms rate your content. If a visitor reads your entire content, shares it on their accounts, and forwards it in a private message, you have struck social media gold. The algorithms will reward you.

Staying Abreast of Social Media

A big challenge for a content creator is staying current with the changing landscape of social media. You can find websites dedicated to regularly posting to social media algorithms, and in the last quarter of 2018, four updates were made to how various social media platforms rank content.

Most recently, Facebook pushed out a new update to their algorithm that discourages the ranking of controversial content, in an attempt to tackle problems with user safety and the spread of disinformation. Just prior to that change, Twitter started testing a new button that allows users to switch between chronological and algorithmic timelines, which gives the user more control over the content they see.

While both of these updates are positive for the users of the social media platforms, you must meet the challenge to stay current with these changes and adapt your content strategy where necessary.

Optimize for Performance

Despite ever changing algorithms, if you create regular, relevant content, your fans will be eager to like and share, and you’ll stand a better chance of getting ranked well on social media. So, make a point of regularly writing articles that are useful to your customers and relevant to your brand.

Planning is vital to quality social media engagement. Deciding which types of content (written articles, videos, animated GIFs, etc.) to display your message and pairing the different content types with the different social media platforms will go a long way in ensuring your content’s visibility and sharing potential.

Match regular, relevant content with a comprehensive understanding of when your audience is more likely to interact with your content on social media, and you’ll have a winning combination.