3 New Social Media Algorithm Changes Bloggers Should Know About
It’s so difficult to keep up posts on our blogs without having to keep up with the ever-changing algorithms of and rules of social media. But here are three changes that recently went into effect that can really change your stats and growth among social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
1. Mobilegeddon is Here
Google’s latest algorithm update favors sites that are “mobile-friendly.” Since there is a transition to many people searching using mobile phones and tablets, Google wants the content displayed to be friendly to those users. Sites that haven’t updated to being mobile friendly could find themselves ranked much lower, according to Google’s algorithm change. (Image credit: www.dailytimesgazette.com)
Want to check your website? Just type in the URL and see if it passes. The URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. If you are on WordPress, there are free plugins to make your site mobile friendly. A quick search will turn up several options. Plus, if you were thinking of upgrading to a new theme, most come with mobile responsiveness built in?
2. Facebook Gives Even Less Credibility to Pages
Going deeper into the rabbit hole of pushing advertising on businesses and marketers, Facebook has decided to give even less priority to pages in its news feed and more to what your friends are doing in the latest algorithm update. That’s great for those of us who use Facebook just to keep up with friends, but not so much for those of use who use it for our blogs or business. A quote from Facebook says “In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline.” Ya think?
3. Instagram Makes Hashtags Time-Sensitive
Hashtags are now tied to when you post, so you can’t add hashtags later and appear at the top of a hashtag search screen. All pictures on Instagram’s hashtag search page used to be sorted in the order when a certain hashtag was added. This means that you could add a new hashtag to your old post and it would appear on top of the search results. Now all pictures are arranged in the order that they were posted. So if you add a hashtag to a photo after you posted it, the photo will still appear on the hashtag page according to the time it was originally posted, not the time the hashtag was added.