Facebook is once again throwing a wrench into your social media strategy. Just last week it announced a major makeover of its homepage. The biggest change that could affect your strategy is the emphasis the network is placing on photos. Users’ news feeds will more prominently display photos and links. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said he wanted the site to be the “best personalized newspaper in the world.” Like a newspaper, he wants the “front page” to be more engaging for users. 
When Facebook makes changes to its site, you should be thinking about how you can adapt your social media strategy to make the most of those changes. If you are going to be spending valuable time on Facebook, you want your posts to be as effective as possible. One way to do this is by staying on top of the latest changes to Facebook’s design and algorithm and tweaking your strategy accordingly.
Since this latest update places even more emphasis on photos, they should be the focus of your updates. Your Facebook strategy will be more like your Pinterest strategy than ever before. When creating content, think about what visual you will use to promote your post. A recent infographic shows Facebook updates with photos receive 120 percent more engagement than those without. As more and more emphasis is placed on visuals in the news feed, this percentage should continue to rise. You want your photos to be unique and prompt someone to want to share them. Think about what types of visuals you are most likely to share and mimic those in your own posts.
So now that you are thinking about the photos in your own content, how can you make other experts’ content more visual in your updates? One item that we have employed since Facebook introduced the Timeline, is to pull the images from the article that you are sharing. Rather than posting your update with a link, we post a photo with a caption and link. Facebook’s algorithm views these as a photo rather than just a link sharing an article and therefore it allows more people to see the post. They also make your page much more aesthetically pleasing than a list of links pulled in. See our Facebook page for an example.
With the new Facebook changes, the articles you post will automatically pull in the original size of the image in the article and not the thumbnail. However, until the changes are entirely in effect we suggest using the strategy above. Also, if you have a more compelling photo for an article that you think would be shared more, you may want to manually add the photo.
You should also be thinking about ways you can take normal text content and turn it into an image. For example, if you post quotes for your fans and followers consider creating an image that includes the quote. PowerPoint is a great application for creating a simple image with text components.
Social media managers need to place more emphasis on their cover and profile photos than ever before. Many Facebook users have not spent much time thinking about their cover photo. While they are a nice visual component to your page, they never appeared in a user’s news feed. That is about to change. When someone “likes” or interacts with your company page their friends will now see your cover photo and profile picture in their news feeds. Cover photos should be engaging and tell your brand’s Story as visually as possible.
The most recent update to Facebook’s news feed is going to make it nearly impossible for a brand’s posts to be seen without a visual component. If your business is going to invest the time needed to manage a social media strategy, ensure your posts are as effective as possible. Each time Facebook updates its design; you should make simple tweaks to your social media strategy to ensure they are best suited for the new updates.
What strategy will you employ to pull more visual components into your social media posts? Share your ideas below.
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Emma Walter is a senior account executive for WordWrite Communications. You can find her on Twitter @emmasreallytall.
