Animal Welfare Professionals

What's everyone doing to react to the changes Facebook has made in how it selects items to show in news feeds? I've noticed a difference lately in responses to my blog's Facebook page, which I assume are being driven by the algorithm changes -- reactions ("likes" etc.) seem to have decreased, while shares and comments have not changed as much. The number of people reached is down a lot on most posts. So it seems like content on the page is reaching fewer people, but the people it does reach are more likely to interact with the page.

I'm planning to step up Twitter activity, and may move to something like Hootsuite to add other platforms. I'd love to hear other ideas/experiences/reactions.

Ugh, I know!  But still, stats show that Facebook is above the other social medai b 50-80% depending on what report you read!  Now one thing to remember is the speed at whch people are reacting using phone or tablets. Google sas every 5 seconds it take a webpage to load you lose 20% of your audience!

Good point. The social media sites seem to work pretty well on small screens, but organizations are going to have to make sure their websites do too.

With changes to the new algorithm on Facebook, much more emphasis is being placed on videos, live videos, comments and engaging your followers in conversation. It's never a bad idea if time allows using more than one platform like Instagram or Twitter, but Facebook is still the most used social platform. I started paying attention to which posts garnish the most comments on our page and have begun posting similar content to that. Sure enough, those posts also have the highest reach, even if they don't have the most shares or reactions.  

I agree with you that Facebook still seems by far the most important venue for animal shelters, even as Twitter has taken over politics and medicine and Instagram and other sites are becoming more important for many. One problem I have is that my purpose is to reach a particular audience, that of people who are actually working in shelter reform. I'm not particularly interested in reaching a large number of people, if those people aren't involved in sheltering. With the new algorithm I feel like I'm in the position of choosing between an emotion-driven article with an appealing video or a fact-based article that maybe has a lousy photo but says something informative for my audience. The first will get a large audience, the second won't under the algorithm.

Ah, then for working with a designated audience, THIS venue is truly the best place I have found for experience, wisdom and ideas! 

That being said,  the onle thing I know that has worked for us, is having carefully chosen venues, to maxiimize exposure to man audiences. 

For instance, we are on meetup, where more than 24 million people have signed up for the site. This data comes from collected data from the Meetup API on American Meetups and found that, as of January 7, 2015, there were 127,630 groups in the United States with an average of 311 members per group.Jan 12, 2016, I have about 4,000 people in my various groups.

Yahoo groups in the web analytics website Quantcast reported around 915 thousand unique visitors to the YG website(US) daily in July 2010. In January 2011 this number increased to 933 thousand unique visitors daily. This number does not include YG members who access the Groups site via email. In September 2010 at its "Product Runway" event, Yahoo told reporters that Yahoo! Groups has 115 million group members and 10 million Yahoo! Groups. In my yahoo group I have had 28,000 members since 2006 come and go. Currently I have over 3000 members. 

Both the groups advertise for me and are a source of fresh volunteers and donars/resources.

My website gets around 4500 hits a month because it is not a static site and is configured for mobile phones and tablets and is configued to deal with clients (left side and donars - central/right side and under a five second loading time.  The facebook page is also a seecding site - in the last two weeks we raised $1500.  Our organization page has about 3900 likes, my personal page  which is an extension from the organzaition page about 2500.  Every time someone shares a post, it is seen by the friends of that friend from my page, andwhen an oragnzatin shares our organiationa post, it shows up on the page for their clients to read. 

Hope some of these thoughts are useful!

CJ, would you mind sharing your website address?  How is it not a static site?  Very curious to see this in action.  Thanks much