Social media is a rapidly changing industry, with new features and changes being introduced on the regular it can be hard to keep up! Luckily, this is what we at CFM are here for, we sift through all the information so you don’t have to, and communicate this to our amazing community of clubs all over Australia and New Zealand.

Today we are going to take a deep dive into Meta’s recent launch of Facebook Reels, which has recently been announced to have expanded to all Facebook users all the while placing a brand new Reels display at the top of all of our news feeds. Facebook Reels has been available in the United States for some time now, however, the expansion of this service now extends to our corner of the world in Australia and New Zealand - so it’s time for us to take notice!

So to start, let’s take a look at how we got here. Video has taken the social media world by storm over the past few years, with Facebook now revealing that video accounts for half of the time people spend on the platform. At the same time TikTok, a platform consisting entirely of short-form video content, has made waves in the social media world over the past few years. Cloudfare announced that TikTok was the most popular website in the world for 2021, jumping previous leaders Google and Facebook. Given TikTok’s rapid growth and Facebook’s struggle to connect with young people (users under 25 have been on the decline on Facebook since 2012), now is the time for Facebook to drastically shift its strategy towards video content, following in line with the launch of Instagram reelslast July.

Now we’re sure at this point you’re reading along thinking something along the lines of ‘this is all good and well to know, but how can I use this information in practice to improve my club?’, but fear not, now that you know the context behind this new feature, let’s dive into how this is relevant to the fitness industry and how you can use it to help your club - the exciting part!

Facebook has a ridiculous number of monthly active users with 2.91 billion(!) active users on the platform as of October 2021. Facebook is great at leveraging their huge user base to maximise monetisation and advertising potential, which is very good news for independent fitness clubs like yours around Australia & New Zealand. 

Facebook will be integrating Reels with its current stories feature and importantly will be adding one key feature alongside Reels - integrated video clipping options. These clipping options will allow for Facebook to leverage its long-form content, which is much more friendly to advertisers (it’s difficult to place an advertisement in the middle of the 15-second clip), by clipping parts of its long-form content and transferring them to Reels. This in turn can drive even more traffic to Facebook’s long-form content and will make users more likely to interact with your club's page, importantly making advertising on the platform even more accessible than it currently already is! This is something that competitors such as TikTok won’t be able to leverage as well due to its lesser amount of long-form content and follows in the path of Google who has used similar integration between its short-form and long-form content on YouTube.

The core message we are seeing here from Facebook is that short-form content drives the most amount of traffic as we can see through TikTok having more hits on its domain than Facebook in 2021, however, longer-form content provides more opportunity for you to connect your club with people in your community and put simply is much more advertiser-friendly, which can be evidenced by the huge revenue gap between Facebook and TikTok despite the above traffic numbers, with TikTok seeing a total of $1.3B in annual ad revenue in the US last year, compared with $48 billion from Facebook - it’s clear through these stats which platform is more suited to advertisers at the moment!

So what are the key takeaways your club can use to make Facebook’s ever-evolving algorithm work for you?

Firstly, prioritise video content and be sure to keep your videos short to take advantage of the aforementioned changes, secondly, be engaging with your videos - grab the user's attention early and be sure to make your content as personalised as possible. Another tip is always to be aware of Facebooks affinity score, and shaping your content to take advantage of this score will help leverage your advertising on the platform to go even further than before.

Here at CFM, we are experts in mastering the Facebook algorithm through our understanding of the affinity score and longstanding partnership with Facebook themselves. Adopting new features and changing the style of your club's content is never easy, however, luckily you’ll be able to leverage our world-class graphic design and social media team to make that transition as easy as possible! This is what we do, and how we help clubs just like yours, through innovative and personalised video content we manipulate the Facebook algorithm to boost your club's affinity score and create real results, which creates action from the users and more traffic into your club. 

written by Sam Hoare CFM Business Development Manager and office basketball champion.