Have you noticed behavior changing on social media?

[KACorman]

Are you finding people aren’t sharing your content?

Is all your website traffic originating from Google and not as much from Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites?

Are you frustrated with Facebook’s changing algorithm and find it is impacting your engagement and ability to show up organically in your followers’ feeds?

You aren't alone.

Buzz Sumo just released their 2018 Content Trends Report and found that based on a sample of 100 million posts published in 2017, social sharing of content has been cut in half since 2015.

Here are some of the key findings from their report:

• The median shares of an article in 2015 was 8- compared to only 4 in 2017
• Only 5% of content is getting more than 343 shares
• Social engagement has declined 60% in 3 years
• Private sharing is increasing. Business Insider says that social messaging has surpassed social media usage.

No, this does not mean that social media is dying.

They did note some positive things in their report:

• Average shares of New York Times content tripled since 2015
• 7 of the top 10 most shared articles on Harvard Business Review over the last 5 years were published in 2017. The other 3 were published in 2016
• The 2 most shared posts from The Economist over the last 5 years were both published
  LinkedIn told Digiday that comments, likes and shares on its platform are up more than 60 percent year over year.

My favorite part of thiis that it is forcing people to think about their content and people are not rewarded anymore for clickbait headlines, etc.

Quality content, well promoted is what you need to do.

If you want some questions that will help you think about your content, you can check out one of our recent blogs on What Makes Good Content?

But really…what can you do?

Well, the biggest recommendation I have (and that Buzz Sumo recommends) is to build your reputation for good content.

If you are consistent and share useful information you will build a following that will engage with you and like and share your content.

And since we are on the Constant Contact blog, I think it is important to note that email will become even more important as social continues to change.

What are you doing to engage with your clients and prospects on social media?

[William87]

I have noticed  several changes. In my web, alufase.com I,ve stopped using Facebook because the scope of my fan page was decreasing every week due to the new algorithm. 

[StevenS551]

Not to outright plug Constant Contact, but I switched from marketing on Social Media like facebook, to here because I got fed up with Facebook changing their algorithm to not show our content to people who they previously did. I'm thinking its going to be more effective to email them relevant content directly.