Facebook Content Strategy 2025: What's Actually Working Right Now
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner.

I'm your host, Michael Stelzer, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle. Today, I'm going to be joined by Mari Smith, and we're going to explore organic marketing strategies and updates on Facebook for 2025. If you have not been paying attention to Facebook because you've been super excited about all the other social platforms, well, this is the episode for you because you're going to learn quite a bit.

By the way, if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us on whatever app you're listening to so you do not miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Mari Smith. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Mari Smith. If you don't know who Mari is, you've got to know Mari. She's the leading expert on Facebook marketing and author of the New Relationship Marketing book. She's a consultant, trainer, and coach who helps small and medium-sized businesses master organic Facebook marketing. She teaches Facebook organic marketing masterclasses, and she is an all-around pro. Mari, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today? Oh,

Oh, thank you so much, Mike. I'm doing awesome. The day that I get to speak to you is always a good one. Well, super excited. Mari and I are going to explore Facebook updates that marketers need to pay attention to in 2025. Now, before we go there, Mari, and for everyone who's listening, this is episode 647 of a weekly show of which you were guest number one. Oh my God!

And you're the only guest that's been on this show 12 times. So just a virtual high five, happy new year to those listening in 2025. It's kind of hard to believe, isn't it? Like it's, we've come a long way, haven't we? I salute you, Mike. That is a lot of episodes. It sure is. And Mari has also been one of the few who's spoken every single year at Social Media Marketing World. We've become really good friends. It's super exciting. And I'm so happy to be here.

to dive in today to a whole bunch of stuff. Before we go there, there are some marketers listening right now who are...

are probably focused on other platforms nowadays, like maybe Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or LinkedIn. So maybe they've given up on their old darling Facebook friend, if you will. So what do you want to say to businesses that maybe aren't as active on Facebook, why they ought to be there?

Sure thing. Two things, Mike, and it's really, really exciting, to be honest. So first of all, there's no question that Facebook continues to hold on to that crown of being the number one social network in the world, over 3 billion monthly active users. And of course, if you take the whole family of apps, it's like 3.29, 3.3 dApps, they call them daily active people who are using at least one meta app every day.

Now, that's number one. So it's the biggest one. I know people, oh, it's for old people. Oh, it's Facebook. It's dead. You see all these crazy memes going around. No, Facebook is alive and kicking. And for this reason, number two, I'm about to share with you, it's organic is really starting to have its heyday again. And the reason being, Mike, is because the algorithms have shifted to what is more interest based than friend based. Thank you.

to TikTok, who really pioneered this whole concept of when you go to scroll through your feed, you're not going to just see content from people you've proactively chosen to follow, people, businesses, et cetera. You're going to see content that is predictable

that you might like, recommended, suggested. Facebook calls it their AI-powered discovery engine. Now on certainly Instagram and Facebook, probably threads, that is as much as 50% of the content you see in your feed is from what they call unconnected sources. So people you've never heard of. Now that's a brilliant,

news. That's great news for marketers because now every single piece of content, one piece of content has the potentiality to go viral, quote unquote. So organic is starting to have its like heyday. Gary Vaynerchuk, longtime mutual friend of ours, he's totally on the same page with all this and really championing this new

concept, if you will, that we are now able to test creative at scale for low to no cost before ever spending a dime on advertising. It's like unprecedented times. So it's no longer about the number of followers you have, you amass a following, then you try to get those people to see your content. Someone with, you know, 500 followers or 500

thousand followers or five million followers has the equal, if you will, equal potential to have a single piece of content any times, multiple times shown in the feeds and to have this whole suggested or recommended, make it go viral and reach way beyond your followers. Does that make sense? Totally. And obviously, for those of us that have been around for a while and have really big followings like you and I do on our company pages,

We're talking like half million and more following that we've developed over the years. It's a little frustrating, but at the same time,

It's very exciting because it does mean now that there's an equal playing field, right? So in the past, it was the folks like us who got in early, who had the unfair advantage. Now today, it's anyone who's able to create the right types of content, including those of us that have been around for a while. We have the opportunity to be discovered by people that have an interest in what we're talking about. That's really what I'm hearing you say, right?

Yeah, exactly. You know, and Gary Vee's often beating the drum of going broad with your content. Don't be afraid to go much broader. Everybody obviously has a niche, a focus. That's great. But you could experiment depending on what type of business you are. If you're an individual creator versus, you know, a company, an agency, start peppering in with just experimenting. Stories are a wonderful place to actually experiment with content. And one quick thing, too, with this discovery engine that Facebook's discovered that it has

This idea of you not necessarily knowing what you're going to get in your feed, it's led to an increase in time spent on Facebook by 8%. It's not a lot, but it is a lot when you think about it. So the time spent on the apps is going up because of that unpredictability of your like scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, look, there's a thing before you know it. You know, you see one cat video, you see a bunch of cat videos. Yeah.

Okay, cool. Well, so what I'm hearing you say, folks, is that, hey, there's a lot of people on Facebook. It's still the biggest social platform. And secondly, there is an opportunity for everyone who's willing to try the things that we're going to be talking about today. So let's dig into it. When it comes to content, organic, non-paid content on Facebook, let's talk about kind of your take on the various forms and kind of, we'll start with short form video. You know, where are we at with that?

Well, it's interesting. It was Adam Masseri, who's the head of Instagram, that came right out in 2020 and said that TikTok is our, quote unquote, most formidable competitor, like ever. So, of course, that's where the whole reels, like they, you know, really TikTok pioneered the short form vertical video and just to do the automated scroll, right, continuous scroll. So, of course, it's worked really well on Instagram. I think it's taken a little bit longer to work on Facebook because

But there's no question that short form video is really the king, if you will, of content type. So marketers would do well to adopt a bit more of that, like up to 90 seconds vertical video format. However, interestingly enough, just like Instagram, Facebook not long ago rolled out a what they call a unified video tab. So just like Instagram amalgamated that IGTV and lives and

feed videos and reels and that is now all one tab. Same thing's happening on Facebook. So that's certainly one format is the short form videos, aka reels, right? 90 seconds. Real quick on the reels. Is Facebook

Up to par with Instagram as far as the feature set on Reels? In my opinion, no. They've definitely dramatically improved. I find myself typically defaulting to create Reels in the Instagram native creator. A lot of people will create them on their desktop using all manner of apps, including AI apps.

nowadays. But yeah, they've definitely improved dramatically. I think probably they're a little bit more improvement to go to really catch up to Instagram. When you think about it, Instagram started as a mobile app and then Facebook, they always like bolted on the mobile. So it's not always been a mobile first experience. Just out of curiosity, sticking on the real thing on Facebook for a second here. Are you finding that certain kinds of content work differently

in Reels better than other kinds of content? If so, like, what do you recommend as far as the way we format our Reels and what we do in our Reels? Yeah, as some of the OG marketers like ourselves here, it can be very tempting to kind of go on the longer side. So a short form is up to 90 seconds when it comes to Reels.

Interestingly enough, TikTok introduced the 10-minute video. So who knows if, you know, meta will slowly increase that 90 seconds. However, you want to pay close attention to your retention. If you're always doing 70, 80, 90-second reels, but you're dropping off after the first 20, 30 seconds, well, go ahead and shorten up your messages. If you're making two to three points, make it like one point per reel. And it

really has to have tremendous hook. You got those three seconds or might even be less than that. We'll talk about that in a moment, but just literally a moment in time to hook people's interest. Great thumbnails. Of course, the thumbnails aren't always as critical because the videos are playing automatically, but that compelling hook, educational, inspirational, obviously not so heavy on nonstop promotion or sales, but just having people get to know you and your brand and

humanizing and personalizing. I see this a lot in my own Facebook training programs that I lead, where I'll put, you know, small businesses volunteer to be in my hot seat. And I look at them and like their whole video approach is forward facing about the product.

And I'm like, why I see a lot of photos here and images and videos of product, but where's the people? Who am I doing business with? So that's really important to just get those people on camera who are willing. It would be certain staff members featuring customers, that kind of thing, you know, bring it to life with the human aspect. Love it. Okay. You were about to talk about image posts. So what's the latest with the image posts? Compelling image posts, ideally using real people. And you can definitely put the link in the first comment, but

There are certain third party apps that will allow you to schedule that link in the first comment. I wish Meta Business Suite would allow that. I have a lot of my audience asking, you know, why can't we put the first comment in Meta Business Suite? But they don't allow that. So image posts for sure. And, you know, it's just before our chat here, I was reading this relatively new term. They're calling it slop, like AI produced content is just like

covering our feed. So I think you can actually stand out by not overusing AI for your images or videos, because I think after a while people are going to kind of get numbed out to that. So if you can have real images, real people. Real quick on the images.

We're talking one image here. We're talking carousels. Do they even offer carousels? Carousels, for some reason, I don't know why Facebook took them away. Well, maybe I do. I think they moved that particular content format into the ads. You can absolutely run carousel ads anywhere.

And, you know, if you cross post your Instagram to your Facebook, which a lot of people do, and carousels are phenomenal on Instagram. You've got up to 20 frames, they call them. And you definitely want to add some music to that. If you can, you add the music natively in the app on Instagram. You can't do any of that on Facebook. And if you cross post, it's not going to show as a carousel. It just shows a bunch of images. So here's the thing that you do definitely want to slightly adjust.

I would rather see you do a carousel post with things like in the caption, let's say swipe, you know, swipe for more. Well, the swipe isn't necessarily relevant on your Facebook post. So maybe you change it up and do it slightly differently on the Facebook post, maybe less images, maybe just one image and not try to make it a carousel on Facebook. What about the size of the image? Are we talking square? Are we talking about landscape? Like what's the preferred size? It's like 940 by 780.

or what? I don't remember the exact dimensions. Is that like the 16 by 9 kind of thing? Is that what we're talking about, like a TV frame? Or what are we talking about? No, not necessarily. No, I wouldn't do 16 by 9, and I wouldn't do 9 by 16 for images. You could. You could try it. But I know, I forget the exact dimensions, but I make my images in Canva. It's like a tall square. Okay. It's maybe like a 4 by 5 aspect ratio. So it's slightly taller than a square. Okay, that's good. So if we're taking a picture from our phone, it's

It's not going to be that size. So you recommend cropping it. So that ends up not leaving a lot of room for text, right? Is really what I'm hearing you say. You've got like one line of text and then the image. Is that generally how it would look in the feed? No, you can write a pretty lengthy caption for an image post. But it crops it out, right? When I'm on Facebook, I'll see people with pictures and there'll be a long description, but I won't realize how long it is because it's hidden by the more button. You know what I mean? So depending on the height of the image, does it show less or more of the text in your professional experience or have you not really noticed?

Well, here's the thing, because I know we're probably going to talk about the personal profile professional mode in a moment, because there's a big difference between going to your business page on your mobile device and posting one or more photos. It's just going to post some photos and they will be the nine by 16 or 16 by nine landscape or portrait. But there's a whole different kind of style of posting on the personal profile at Facebook.com.

calls it layout and it'll be like four or three or four, like in a nice column or have a nice frame around it, nice color. So they're really have this lovely feature on the personal profile. I wish they'd bring it to pages. Yeah, I've seen that with a lot of people at like events or experiences having a whole bunch of pictures and it profiles like the top five and then the rest are hidden. Okay, so image posts,

are working, but not with the link in the post, a link in the comments is what you're saying, correct? Yeah. And sometimes people get confused because when you go and you make a link post, it will populate with what Facebook calls a link preview. That is a landscape image, 16 by nine. And then it will be, the link is appended. It's like a,

integral part of the image. That's not an image post. That's a link post. And so you can experiment. I'm not saying never post a link post. You could do some link posts. You could do some image with the link in the caption or some image with links in the comments. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the other types. Yeah, let's go. Yeah. So, so colorblind, I know on your page too, on the social media examiner Facebook page and my own page, I love this one particular type of

with the background color or color box or whatever you want to call it. It gives you a smaller amount of text, but it's a large and the algorithms read it as a text post. It really stands out in the feed because it's got these bright colors. You can only choose from what Facebook gives you and you can do it in Meta Business Suite directly on the apps.

or on desktop. And I love to frame those as questions, something compelling, or it could be something funny or it could be something highly shareable, something highly engaging. I mean, just not just like a quote or a meme or something, but something that really hooks people's minds and gets them to stop in their tracks and immediately engage with it. Those are great to do once or twice a week, maybe more often. They seem to get a lot of reach too, don't they? They really do. And I was recently teaching one of my Facebook

classes, organic. And several of my students were like, oh my God, I'm blown away. I hadn't even tried this particular content type. And their reach and engagement just went through the roof with one of those posts. Yeah. And then what about the text-only short text updates that we've been experimenting with?

Text only, I personally usually put a piece of media. I don't do that much text only on my Facebook page. Certainly, again, people can experiment. I know that you yourself have experimented with some long form text and then maybe seems like shorter is better these days for sure. I'm also a huge fan of stories. I think it's one of the most underutilized stories.

top of mind, top of feed, visibility, awareness, reach tools. The thing with stories is they're not part of the discovery engine. Your stories only get seen by people who follow you, but they do get prominent positioning at the top of the feed.

And one other content type I want to mention here on Organic Mike is live, live streaming. It feels like live streaming kind of plateaued and maybe tapered off a bit. But I'm hearing and seeing that there's some tremendous uptick about to happen with live shopping. Live shopping is making a big comeback thanks to the app called Whatnots.

not everybody's going gaga for this app called whatnot. Maybe Facebook will buy them. I've been seeing that live works really well for any businesses that are doing like arts and crafts, demonstrations, cooking, DIY, or sharing their screen, something where there's something for people to kind of like see and engage with and, and do a demonstration, instructional, educational. So I think we're going to see quite an uptick in live.

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So what I'm hearing you say is that short form videos are the hot thing right now. And where would you rank image posts versus these color background posts? Would you put them equal or? I would put them equal. Yep. Okay, cool. And then a lot of these other things are experimental. I've been experimenting with text. I have found that really, really long text, preemptive.

performs better on pages than it does on personal profiles, which is really bizarre. But maybe because we have a massive following on our page, I don't know. But also really, really short text seems to perform really well as well. So, you know, obviously you got to experiment. These algorithms are constantly changing. So you hinted earlier about the personal profile. Let's talk about this thing called professional mode. Not everyone's going to understand what it is. So talk

talk to us a little bit about what it is and what some of the features are, because it seems as if Facebook is really looking to try to get creators, human beings, right, that are not necessarily brands on the platform. And it seems like this professional mode is for them. You're absolutely right. So it was first rolled out, I want to say late 2021, kind of an experimental mode, and then slowly but surely,

rolled out to pretty much everybody in the world, as far as I know. And it's absolutely, you're absolutely spot on. You know, Facebook came up with this concept to appeal to those entrepreneurs, creators, solo professionals, yeah, maybe small business, personality-based business, that kind of thing, who either were not using a Facebook page at all, never created one, not using it, or had kind of given up on it, or it kind of had plateaued, or they were never likely to like really buy any ads. So it's like, okay, fine.

Fine, let's meet them where they are. And you can just flip a switch and it's on your mobile or desktop. It's under the three little dots and it will say, you know, turn on professional mode. If it turns out you don't like it, you can switch back to what they call classic mode or main mode. Now, why would you use it?

features, OMG, you're going to get metrics. You get a professional dashboard. It is the closest thing you're going to get to a business page, but personal. So you can still post to friends only or specific friends. You're still locked down in private. It's just that everything you post to public is basically anybody can follow, you know, as many public followers as you, as you want, and you will get access to metrics. Wait, let's slow down just so everybody's clear. A

Follower versus a friend, right? So this is a lot of people don't want to make friends with strangers. Well, you put on professional mode, that'll be the default option, right? For them to follow you. And those followers...

obviously are going to be notified. Now, I mean, and there's a lot of people that struggle because they say to themselves, I only use Facebook for personal stuff. I guess you could create a secondary account and make it your professional account, or do you not recommend that? No, you're not supposed to have more than one account necessarily. The rules are, if you really want to stick with them, I know a lot of people do break the rules, but you're supposed to have one individual account in your own real name. And then they do

a little while ago. I don't know if it's going to stay or not, but they have this whole sub account thing, but you can only have professional mode on the main account. You couldn't have professional mode on the other ones. So you could absolutely still continue to use your profile, really kind of lock down and, you know, just,

specific friends. You can even actually, I was talking to one of my clients yesterday where you can choose to like Zuckerberg, if anybody goes to facebook.com slash Zuck, you'll see you can't add them as a friend. So you can lock it down where actually nobody can add you as a friend. The only thing they can do is follow you. Because if when you switch to professional mode, people still can send your friend request. What happens though is that, yeah, they'll be sitting there as a pending friend, but they'll also immediately become a follower.

There's definitely advantages. I've gone back and forth over the last couple of years where I've had it on professional mode. I saw a massive spike in my reach and then it kind of slowly tapered off after six months or so. So I switched back and then right now I'm in a phase where I'm really enjoying professional mode again. And the secret, though, is to absolutely favor when you can more on the video side.

So I see that they're definitely rewarding with better reach and engagement. When you use professional mode that you're doing a little bit more on the reels, the short form videos, you can still absolutely do all we just talked about on the page with the photo pose, the background color. Those are great for questions and things like that. And then even that layout, as we mentioned earlier, for multiple photos, even 3D. There's that one little feature. You can make a photo into 3D and it kind of moves when you scroll in the feed. Well, and you can schedule, right? That's another big one.

You can schedule mobile only. And I was just testing that before our chat here today to make sure you can schedule more than once. So it's not like you just get one time to schedule. You can load up a bunch of scheduled posts on the mobile device

And then you can also access to the boost button. Now, this is a real game changer for a lot of people potentially so that you can see back to what we started talking about with this discovery engine where everybody has this potential for individual pieces of content to really go viral, quote unquote, or to basically get a lot more reach engagement than some of your other content. Well, guess what? That is the algorithm and Facebook users telling you, you got a great piece of content here. So why not?

throw 10, 20, 100 bucks on the boost and let it go further with strategic intent. Of course, if you're sending people to an opt-in or whatever your strategic intent is, right? Selling something, just driving awareness. Yeah. The monetization thing, I'm assuming is where you're going next. Talk to me about that. Yeah. Yeah. So monetization and Mike, for as long as Facebook's had monetization, actually all these platforms, I'm kind of a bit of a fence sitter with that because

my frustration with it is whether it's TikTok, you know, YouTube, Meta, they dangle these big carrots. Oh, monetize your content. And then people try to go all in and create that as a career, right? A career that's going to pay them six figures, you know, multiple six figures, seven figures. It is a

lot of work to be a full-time creator and get your money from these, you know, ads, in-stream ads, revenue share, our bonus program, subscriptions, stars. And I just say to people, look, treat it as your quote, Starbucks money. It's just bonus money. If you get a few dollars, great. If you get, maybe put it in your kid's school fund, if it amounts to much, but don't rely on it. I've never turned it on. I mean, you have to turn it on, right? If I'm not mistaken, because I've not. No,

Oh, I don't believe I've ever gotten paid, but I never asked to be paid either. You know what I mean? You're right. You do have to set up your payout. You have to set up the details of how they're going to pay you and your bank account that has to be set up in advance. And then there are certain programs and initiatives that they'll periodically roll out where it'll flag up and go, hey, you're eligible.

You know, you're eligible for our, for a while they did, they did that reels, you know, bonus for their pain as much as $30,000 for one reel that got a certain amount of views. Okay, cool. So, all right. So far we've talked about professional mode and if you have a personal profile and you're using it for business and you haven't turned on professional mode, go ahead and turn it on because there's a whole bunch of cool features and capabilities and analytics and all this kind of stuff. We've also talked about all the different types of organic content that

Now on the analytics side, you told me something when we were prepping for this that kind of blew my mind. Facebook has recently changed the way that they are providing analytics to people in a pretty critical way. So tell us the scoop. What's the deal? Yeah. So it rolled out first on Instagram. Adam Aseri did a reel and explained it to everybody. And there was still some confusion. And then now it's on Facebook or certainly rolling out. So there's a new unified metric, a

across all your post types simply called views. Views is replacing impressions. Views is not just video or reels. Views is your images, your stories, your carousels on Instagram, all a view. And so it's also repeat, repeat. So like if one person happens to see the same piece of content three times, that's going to count as three views.

Now, here's the interesting thing that also blew my mind. And I had to go directly to Meta, some of my contacts there, and clarify because they were not upfront about saying this. But if you dig down into the Facebook Help Center, you'll find that historically a Reels play, they didn't ever call it a view, a Reels play is one millisecond, whereas a video view is three seconds.

So you can imagine when they brought out this unified metric, I'm like, okay, guys, which is it? Is it now three seconds or is it one? Is everything one second? And sure enough, it is. One millisecond or one second. Yeah, excuse me, one millisecond. So keep going. What does that really mean? Help us understand. What that means is the split second on your desktop, tablet, phone, split second.

millisecond that a piece of content is flying by your screen, that counts, that count as a view. Therefore, you might well see an uptick. So you might be like looking at your metrics, if you weren't aware, I'm saying you, your listeners, as they weren't aware of this new unified views metric, oh my god, all of a sudden, my content's getting seen by more people. Well,

may or may not be. So it's going to, you know, just take a little while to kind of even out and you'll get a sense of your own new benchmarks, right? So maybe you were getting 500 views on a video before and now all of a sudden you see you've got, you know, a thousand, 2000 views and thinking, oh wow, my content's doing better, but it's just that it's counted differently. Well, and this is important for us to explore this, especially for anybody who's analytically minded, because

at least on the Facebook desktop, which a lot of us marketers spend a lot of time on the desktop because we work typically on a computer. Sometimes the video doesn't automatically play when you see it in the feed. You just see the thumbnail of it. Well, guess what? Just the fact when you see that thumbnail going by, that's considered a view. And a lot of people's minds, well, that's kind of messed up because they really didn't view the video at all. All they saw was the thumbnail of it going by on the desktop, right? And this is...

Going to be really challenging for people that are frankly looking at metrics, right? Because on YouTube, it used to be at least 10 seconds, if I'm not mistaken, and it might be less than that now. So this is going to be really challenging when we look at our analytics for videos, right?

Do they provide deeper analytics? Are there retention graphs in there with actual numbers so we can get a sense of how many views there are? Oh, absolutely. There's retention. That's a graph you want to really pay close attention to. Is it a relative graph or does it tell you the actual numbers? Do you understand what I'm asking? It tells the actual numbers. Oh, it does. Okay. Got it. So why do you think they're calling a view something that the...

You know, I mean, it's so crazy. Is this just a way of inflating numbers here or making people feel better or what's the deal here? I don't know. It's simplified. It's to simplify things. Okay. It's to simplify. And I'm not a TikToker, but I would imagine that it was inspired by TikTok. Okay.

You know, I have a big question right out there right now, which, you know, as soon as I find out the definitive answer, I will certainly be announcing it as how does this affect ads, right? Because if you're doing video ads, are you now seeing video views? Because I was digging around an ads manager and I can see so far it still is the three second view. Also, when you're building custom audiences on the ad side. So we'll see how this unified metric is going to also make its way into the ads manager, you know?

Okay, another question. I don't know if you're going to have the answer to, but on Instagram, I believe they used to at least, and maybe I'm mistaken, maybe this is LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I think they publicly show the views, quote unquote, or the impressions of

Instagram, I think, used to show this, but now they're hiding this information, right? Didn't they used to show like the number of views on videos and then they decided to hide it or something like that? Oh, no, no, no. You can absolutely still see it. What it is, it was supposedly a mental health plan. I'm saying supposedly because- Anyone could see it. Now it's just you. Is that how it works, basically? No, you can see anybody's views. Oh.

For real, the number of people that have seen a reel, for example. Okay. What they had was the number of reactions, the number of likes. I see. Now they have the option. So you, the user, can choose you want to turn it on or off. So what do you think we as marketers should optimize for? Engagement?

Or views? Like what's the metric? Views, views, views, views should be your 100% across the board metric on all the meta properties now. Okay. So does engagement not really matter anymore? Because it used to be such a big deal. Remember Mark Zuckerberg said he was optimizing for meaningful engagement back in the day? Yeah. Is that gone? Are those days beyond us? Here's the interesting thing that they do go hand in hand, see? Because the more engagement, so people watching your reels, people...

well, watching the reels is part of it. Commenting on your posts. Putting your reactions on comment. I'll tell you what is a number one indicator of a potential greater reach, certainly on Instagram. And I know they're applying this to Facebook too, is the number of private shares. So as people hitting that wee airplane icon on Instagram, the share button on Facebook and sharing your content in the private DMs with their friends. So think about that as a marketer. How can you craft your content that people feel compelled to share with their friends

one-on-one, you know, people individually, Hey, take a look at this. This was really helpful, informative, educational, breaking news, whatever it might be. Okay. Before I go to the next question, I've got a couple of thoughts that I think everybody in the audience wants me to ask you, Mari, which is if we have a post that does not get a lot of views right out of the gate,

Should we delete it and try it again? What's your thoughts on this? I have never been a fan of deleting. I really haven't. And especially now with the way these algorithms are working, I have seen content, older content, suddenly like...

steam, pick up some traction and start to go out in the feed. And I just feel too, let's say you had like three people commented on it and you normally get 30 or something. Well, I feel like you're kind of dissing those three people. Sorry. Oh no, you commented, but I'm going to delete this. I don't think personally it serves a purpose. I know several like thought leaders and creators that they have that philosophy. Oh, it didn't perform. I'm just going to dump it out. You know, we delete it and they come to see that maybe it does affect their

overall performance positively. I've personally not been a fan of that. Help us understand how the algorithm works because my understanding is it shows it to a sample and

And basically, based on the reaction of the sample, it decides to expand it. Is that correct or am I wrong on this? There's definitely a way that it does that if you use the A-B testing feature inside of Meta Business Suite. They want us to do that a little bit more often because it's very similar to split testing in the ads manager. So that's definitely going to a sample testing, you know, certain features.

portions of your audience. Yeah, this whole point about the engagement and the reach or slash, you know, views, they go hand in hand because the more engagement a post gets, the more reach it gets. There's no question. It would be highly unlikely that you're suddenly going to have a viral piece of content with very little engagement, to be quite frank. They do pretty much go hand in hand. Well, I guess where I'm going with this is

In an ideal world, I think you probably know this, that if all of a sudden you post something and it gets a lot of comments and likes, that's a sign that that's going to perform pretty well. Yeah. Right? Oh, yeah. It kind of begs the question, does it matter what time I post? Because what if I post when my audience is sleeping? You know what I mean? Because I'm just reverse engineering kind of how this would work.

You know, I'm assuming the algorithm is showing it to my most loyal, probably followers at first to kind of see what their reaction is. It isn't about loyal followers. It's about non-followers too. And that's a metric that people really need to start paying close attention to. It's really easy to see on Instagram. You have to dig around a bit in the metrics in their Meta Business Suite for Facebook.

but you want to keep a close eye on your non-followers. So that is where it's going beyond people who have proactively chosen to follow you, where the AI is predicting, hey, these other people, this whole other group of people you didn't even know existed and they didn't know you existed, but because Meta has a bazillion data points on everybody, they've predicted that these other folks would be interested in your content too. And it doesn't matter whether it's image post or a reel or a text post. Not necessarily. Or you're specifically referring to reels.

Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is that any post you publish on Facebook could potentially be seen by non-followers or non-fans. Yes, correct. That's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And do you think it doesn't matter what time you post? Look, if you're a small local business and vast majority of people who are like going to come into your store, your shop or practice, whatever, you know, are predominantly in the same time zone.

and then it might matter, you know, and I would favor kind of like weekends and evenings in that case. However, for a vast majority of us, internet-based businesses, you have a global audience. Somebody's awake 24-7. And so I personally don't always fall into the, you know, when your audience is online, I don't trust that they're that accurate. You can experiment for sure, but I don't think that the timing is so crucial. For those of us that haven't dug into the analytics side of things,

is there a place we should look to see, like, do they provide reporting to say this percentage of the post was seen by fans, followers versus viewers?

friends versus like non kind of thing. Does it provide that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It just calls them non followers across the personal profile and across the business page. Is that correct for the professional profile? Good question on the professional dashboard. You know, I don't think they give those numbers. Okay. But it definitely does on pages. Definitely pages and Instagram business. Okay, good. All right. Yeah. You don't have to worry about looking that up. Okay. So what we've talked about so far is

is, hey, organic content is, I mean, in reality, Facebook wants people to create organic content, which is why it's showing other, there's probably not enough content for the amount of people that are on Facebook, right? So that's probably why you have this, some of the most creative people tend to be performing very, very well on Facebook because their stuff is getting shown to lots of people.

And that's an opportunity for those of us that can get creative. Video is where it's at. We talked about these text-based boxes. And then we talked about, you know, the most important metric is a view. And a view is really an impression. That's just the code word for it, right? Now, AI. I'm excited to talk to you about AI. As you know, I have another show called AI Explored. Talk to us a little bit about AI.

And I will just set us up a little bit that Mark Zuckerberg is one of the major players in the AI world, right? And he's got some stuff that you're going to talk about. People don't think of meta slash Facebook when they think of AI. They think of open AI and they think of Claude and maybe they think of Google Gemini, but

But tell us a little bit about what Meta is doing with AI, because maybe not a lot of people really have wrapped their brain around this. Truly, truly. Well, you know, we have to remember that, you know, Meta is a trillion dollar company. They have an enormous amount of money. And so they, but they were a little bit late to the game. OpenAI just happened to beat everybody to the punch. And so that's the most established, ChatGPT, followed by several others that you've mentioned, Claw, Jasper, Gemini. But funnily enough...

Mark Zuckerberg, he loves to declare in each of his earnings calls that meta AI is the most used or the most popular AI assistant in the world. Well, of course, if you've got 3 billion plus users and you're shoving it into every nook and cranny across the DMs, across the search bar. But does that really mean people are utilizing it like in place of...

All these other ones? I don't think so. I recently had put up a post on my own Facebook page and I said, hey, okay, if you had to choose, chat TPT or Meta AI, you could only choose one. Nobody said Meta AI. And then others as well. A few people like myself said, you know, I like Meta AI for images. There's definitely really cool things you can do with the image. The image creator, you just start with the prompt imagine and it will create some really cool, fairly photorealistic images.

Not everybody has access to the full desktop like meta.ai, which is where that's the competitor to ChatGPT. You can ask it pretty much anything you can ask ChatGPT. You can ask at meta.ai and including creating those images.

So that's it on kind of like the generative AI side. There's a few other AI integrations across the Facebook, as we're talking about predominantly today. Some folks have probably seen those little comment summaries. For now, I'm only seeing them on mobile, but it kicks in after a certain number of comments and the AI just makes a summary.

I don't know about you, I do read them. I find it saves me having to wade through all the comments to see what's going on here. - I love it because it helps me kind of understand the vibe of the comments, right? - Yeah. - Because who has time to read through sometimes hundreds of comments, right?

I find it super valuable and it kind of reminds me of like what I see on Amazon. You know, they have AI integrated into Amazon and they'll kind of tell you kind of here's what the main people are saying with the reviews. You know what I mean? And it's kind of a similar kind of useful feature. So that is an AI feature that most people don't even think of as AI. It's a summary kind of thing, right? That's right. What else is baked into Facebook? Well, I have heard.

and read that what's also coming to the feed is the AI summaries or AI produced content. So it's going to kind of like summarize certain posts for you. And so that'll be interesting. Can't talk too much about that yet because it's not here, but that is coming. What is also being tested though is AI generated images coming to your feed, Instagram and Facebook, some of which

will contain your face. And this part spooks me out and creeps me out a little bit. And I actually had one of my clients where she shared this picture and she was blown away. It was a cute little, she's an adult, same age as me, but she had this cute little picture of herself, like five years old.

And Facebook pops this image in front of her and they had totally changed the background with AI. She had like bare feet, it put shoes on her and it had like this fancy car and fancy house in the background. She's like, did it look like an old fashioned picture? Like it was set in another era. Okay. Fascinating. I suppose. Yeah, I did kind of from the era.

I don't know, just about like privacy. And it just felt like a little bit of a violation to me. I personally wouldn't be so keen on that. I know a lot of people are just loving this where that you take the selfie and you tell Meta AI, imagine me in a spacesuit, you know, imagine me in a field of unicorns, whatever. And it creates these pictures and then people are making it their profile pictures. And I don't know, I just, for me personally, it doesn't feel very authentic. Okay. A couple of quick questions.

The AI is built into the search, right? And this can get confusing for people sometimes, right? Isn't it kind of like a weird circle with a symbol on it or something like that? When you're searching on Facebook, doesn't it like sometimes you give you AI responses and sometimes give you regular search responses? You're close. I think that for lack of a better place to put the tool, the colorful pinky blue circle is the...

icon the logo if you will for meta ai so you'll see that everywhere and sometimes it dances and moves so the tiny bit of movement is trying to pull your eye in and get you to engage with it you'll see it sometimes the bottom right of a phone screen but also it's in the search bar and it gives you sample prompts too so it's wanting you to just tap on one of those sample prompts

And another use case too in the feed, which some folks are finding rather irritating, is for example, I had one of my clients, he sells cruises to Alaska to see the Northern Lights, right? The Aurora Borealis. And he's like, he showed me a screenshot of Meta AI giving the ability for people to click off his post and go find out more about cruises to Alaska that had nothing to do with him. And so I was like, wait a minute, that's not fair. So, eh,

It's still kind of early days yet of how they're rolling these things out. Well, it's really fascinating because for those that may not be aware, Mark Zuckerberg is coming out with an open source model called Llama. And Llama is basically his answer to what all the other big companies are doing. And basically, it allows you to download it if you want to on your computer and develop your own models.

And Mark Zuckerberg, surprisingly, has taken a position where he's like, I'm going to give it away free to the world, right? And open source is the way, which is actually antithetical to everything he's built because everything he's built has been a closed ecosystem, right? Where it hasn't been open. But it's really intriguing and smart because they've got the money to be able to develop this open source model. And my understanding is meta,

Meta AI, Lama, whichever model it is, it is being trained on all of the information that we're posting on Facebook and Instagram. Do you know if we have the option to opt out of that? I don't think we do, do we? They, Meta gave a cursory hat tip nod to folks in the EU. I've heard and seen some screenshots. It's a convoluted process. Can we even trust if you do happen to fill out that form and you say, you know, don't use anything

any of my data points to train your AI. Can we trust that they really are? I don't know. It's just, it's frustrating. I think in today's world, if you're on the internet, certainly on social media, your content is being used to train their large language models.

The thing with Meta is they have absolutely declared that they use anything publicly shared to train Lama. I still think, though, Mike, I think they're mining private messages and WhatsApp and DMs and Facebook Messenger accounts.

Instagram, the works. What about the ads manager side of things with AI? You were telling me that there's some cool stuff going on there, right? There really is. And actually, Meta really wants us to use more in the ads manager side of things. So Meta AI is baked in there. The one place I think is really super cool and useful for advertisers is where you can just literally pop in a couple of words in your primary text, your headline, and put

it will just absolutely produce all of these alternative versions for you. Some of them quite expanded, basically doing the copywriting for you. You can test as many as you want. It will also enhance images. Like, I don't know if you have like, the example is a white sofa and you've got ideally with no background or you just have it take the background out. Now we'll mock that up into like different living rooms or make it look much prettier, more compelling in the feed. So those two things you can do.

You can't actually so far create images from scratch in the meta ads manager, which I think right now is a good way forward because otherwise we could have our feeds filled with all kinds of weird looking AI created ads. Well, I'm sure people are already using AI tools to create

Absolutely, they are. There's absolutely nothing stopping that. Nothing stopping that. No, you're absolutely right. The one final thing too, Mike, that I think is really quite exciting is what Meta calls their Advantage Plus. It's like the word advantage with a little plus appended. There's Advantage Plus Creative, which we've just talked a little bit about there, shopping campaigns, and then the audience, Advantage Plus audience, where it's so much of that discovery engine where it's saying, you're saying to the

ads algorithm. Hey, these are my people. This is who I want to reach. These are, but it's like, oh, how about we just use those as suggestions and you allow us to go way broader than that. Because we actually know there's all these other potential buyers or customers for you that you didn't realize you could reach, but let our, you know, AI reach them. So I think that's a really good thing.

Mari, thank you, first of all, for answering all of my questions and enlightening us about where Facebook Organic is in 2025. There's going to be people that might want to connect with you on the socials. Where do you want to send them? And then if they want to work with you also, where do you want to send them? Oh, thanks for asking. Pretty much find me anywhere under Mari Smith at marismith.com. And yep, as I like to say, just Google me. You can reach out to me on the DMs on Facebook or Instagram and sometimes LinkedIn, but mostly the FB and IG. Thank you.

Thank you, Mari, so much for sharing your insights today. My pleasure. Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 647.

If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a long time listener, would you give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on and let your friends know about the show? I'm at Stelzner on Facebook, at Stelzner on LinkedIn, and at Mike underscore Stelzner on X. And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld.info.