Ask any experienced Facebook marketer how to succeed on Facebook and invariably they’ll mention the News Feed. This river of stories is the core of the Facebook experience. So when Facebook tweaks the News Feed algorithm (formerly called EdgeRank), marketers need to adjust their content strategy.

Facebook just announced that starting January 21st, text posts from Pages will have a lower weighting in the News Feed algorithm.

Text status updates look like this:

While they can include links, they don’t include photos, videos, or link previews. For example, the status update above includes a link, but no preview. The link post below includes a full link preview:

Post reach is a function of fan engagement and algorithm weighting. As a result of Facebook’s algorithm change, a link post that includes a link preview will generate more impressions-per-engagement than a simple text status update that includes a link but no preview.

Most content strategies incorporate a number of different types of posts. Some posts are focused on getting the word out. For these FYI posts, the goal is to maximize impressions/reach. When posting these, experiment with link posts instead of text status updates because that avoids the reduction in reach for text status updates. For example, take a text status update like “Our credit card processing system just passed the latest security audit,” and add a link to a webpage about credit card security.

Other posts focus on building a brand by establishing rapport with customers. These posts generally focus on driving deep engagement with your core audience—you don’t want someone to just see a status update, you want to actually generate an emotional response. Text status updates and photos are both effective at driving this deep engagement because they focus on the essence of the post without distraction. For example, if a bakery posted “Banana bread: Better with or without chocolate chips?” they will likely generate more engagement if they don’t include a link.

While it looks like a link post, this is actually a photo upload that includes a link in the caption.

Finally, some posts are focused on getting users to click through to a website. While you can put the link in either a text status update, a photo caption, or a link status update, across our customer base, link posts are already the consistent winners at driving traffic. After this change to the News Feed algorithm, we expect link posts to outperform plain text updates by an even greater margin.

Regardless of the type of post, if you put paid spend behind your posts then it’s important to monitor their performance in real-time. Don’t use advertising dollars to prop up boring content, use it to accelerate successful content. Unfortunately, no marketer can predict with 100% accuracy which posts will flop and which will succeed. So use a real-time analytics tool like Unified Now to move advertising dollars away from posts that are flopping and toward posts that are succeeding – and remember that you should make that determination within the first 24 hours.

All page audiences are different, and it’s important to figure out what works for you and your audience. Some audiences engage more with links, some with pure text. If your fan base strongly prefers text updates, you might find the extra engagement is a stronger factor than the lowered algorithmic weighting.