Many small businesses rely on Facebook to showcase their offerings and are expected to suffer the most from these changes unless they adopt a new strategy
On January 11th, 2018 Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is changing how it will prioritise content that is shown on people’s newsfeeds. In his post, he states that “recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other”. This means that in the weeks to come, Facebook’s newsfeed will show less branded and marketing content and more content from family and friends, helping users “have more meaningful social interactions.”
Facebook’s new focus on friends and family means that content from your business page will be hugely reduced, if not eliminated from people’s newsfeeds. So, even if a person likes and follows your page, the chance of one of your publications ending up on a user’s newsfeed is highly unlikely. Mark Zuckerberg stated clearly in his post that “as we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.”
What are the main changes:
- Video will get less watch time, so users will begin to see less video in the newsfeed.
- Links to external pages will get less visibility. This is of concern to bloggers or anyone who has in the past published posts that linked back to their website.
- All posts will be impacted by these changes, including posts from pages and from people.
Many small businesses have relied on Facebook to communicate with their audience. In fact, it has been common practice for many businesses and blogs to promote their latest news and offerings via a Facebook business page. With these changes, small businesses that have little to no advertising budget are expected to suffer the most.
While some termed these changes as the “Facebook Apocalypse”, Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, has a different opinion. On the January 19th Social Media Marketing Talk Show (watch the replay here), Stelzner and his team discuss these changes in detail, reassuring us that it’s not the end for Facebook marketing, rather a new strategy is needed: “industry experts have reassured page owners that this recent change merely requires an adjustment to their Facebook strategies and may actually benefit those using their Facebook presence to authentically engage and interact with their community.”
Here’s what you can do:
- Less is more – scale back the frequency of your posts to once a week.
- Focus on publishing more thoughtful posts that will spur audience engagement and interaction. Stop publishing “inspirational quotes” posts, for example.
- Try to create content that will drive conversations and get people talking with each other rather than with your page. However, don’t try to outsmart the system by asking people to comment, that will not work.
- Stop scheduling posts as they will most likely get penalised.
- Communicate through live video. Live video gets about six times more interaction that normal video so be sure to master your live appearances with something that will be of benefit to your fans.
- Ask your community to select your page as a “See first” in their newsfeed preferences.
- Master Facebook adverts and allocate some budget as it is the only way to ensure that your content will be seen.
- Learn how to use the Facebook messenger chat box which allows you to carry on the conversation outside of the Facebook platform.
- Explore if a Facebook Group could be beneficial for your community or not.
- Keep up to speed on what’s happening and learn from the experts:
As stressed by Facebook “meaningful content” is the key here and those who believe that they can outsmart the changes by posting via their personal profiles are in for a shock. The same content rules apply whether it’s a business page or a personal profile
This blog was kindly provided by Denise Kennedy .. to contact Denise and get marketing advice for your business visit Startupmarketingmentor.com
