10 top tips for reaching an audience on Facebook

When Facebook’s Anna Chanduvi spoke to Broadcast Sport at our Virtual Breakfast Club last month she revealed a number of Top Tips for ensuring your sports content ticks the right boxes for Facebook’s algorithms.

Her invaluable ‘take home’ insights into best practice are as follows. You can also watch the whole of her session, which provides additional detail around these insights, as well as some case study examples of well-performing sports content on Facebook and Instagram, below.

Anna Chanduvi’s 10 Top Tips

1. Five years ago, Facebook [algorithms] were around newsfeed, being viral – short clips that catch your attention. Now, with Facebook Watch, it’s all about intentional viewing and making sure people come back and actually seek out your stream, your broadcast or your content

2. For Facebook video, we encourage publishers to post as much content that’s over one minute, especially over three minutes, because that’s when they can also monetise at a highest possible CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) with ad breaks inserted in their streams

3. Take advantage of new surfaces such as Instagram Reels to reach and engage unconnected audiences

4. The audience development best practice is really just publishing on a regular basis, and making sure that you drive one minute views

5. One minute views on Facebook are a super important metric to assess the performance of your content and making sure that people are actually sticking around to watch the whole thing

6. Loyalty and intentional viewing, and overall watch time – these are quality metrics that tell you that someone’s actually coming out and seeking your content on a regular basis

7. If you drive one-minute views [on Facebook Watch] and loyal viewing, which means people coming back on a regular basis to watch your content on your page, that’s ultimately what we call best practice

8. The reason I say 3+ minutes for content on Facebook is that content typically performs the best in terms of ad breaks. These are inserted when a viewer watches for one minute, and the CPMs on content that are over three minutes are usually the highest

9. IGTV is content that’s more around storytelling, and clips that are longer than one or two minutes. Instagram Reels is all about trends and short form. Instagram Live is more around deeper storytelling, around a specific moment. So it’s probably less prescriptive than the 3+ minutes thing on Facebook, but it’s still around how are you using all those different surfaces available to you to drive your audience and monetisation objectives

10. Increasingly, publishers want some form of ROI from their content and especially now in the world of Covid where so many business models are challenged and there’s a lot of pressure to drive revenue, we can help provide a lot of those opportunities to partners