04 Feb What’s going on with Facebook?
Posted by Sean Curry
If you haven’t heard by now, Facebook is changing for better or worse. The reason, Mark Zuckerberg says, is “posts from businesses, brands, and media–is crowding out the personal moments.” So what are we going to do about it and how does it affect us? Business pages will be affected by this the most but before you go thinking this is only affecting businesses, think again. Some of the changes will also impact individual pages and groups. Like it or not, you will have to change your online marketing strategy going forward.
You may have already noticed some of these changes in your news feeds with more personal posts and few, if any, business posts. In addition, the organic reach for business pages have declined by 50% or more over the last 3 – 4 months and longer.
So what is going on and what is going to happen? Facebook wants to “bring people together.” How they are doing this is pretty specific. They want long meaningful conversations and interactions and these are going to be the determining factor of ranking and posts being seen. Likes and shares will be good but they are only looking at the true dialog between your followers. The longer the better.
They are also cracking down on links to external pages, so they won’t be showing as many links to blog posts, news etc. Yes this means on personal pages, groups etc. too. Always remember Facebook loves Facebook and will give emphasis to themselves over outside links.
Videos have been all the rage this past year. Everyone getting on the band wagon; however, videos will also be a problem. They are “primarily, a passive experience” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s Head of News Feed says. You will be seeing less “how to” videos and animations. They are great for attention grabbing but terrible for any meaningful interaction.
If you think you can get around this by prompting your followers to start a dialog, the social media network has already cracked down on this “engagement bait” tactic. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/news-feed-fyi-fighting-engagement-bait-on-facebook/v Now you can understand why some people are calling this a Facebook Apocalypse.
What does this really mean besides rethinking your online social media strategy? This means you will need to put some thought and effort into every post to ensure it is thought provoking and engaging. This will result in posting less but spending more time on the posts you put up on Facebook. Facebook live is another option, as your followers are alerted when you have started broadcasting, but again the content needs to get people to engage with you.
You can also take out a Facebook Ad every now and again which will help get in front of people’s news feeds, which isn’t a bad idea anyway regardless of these changes. For this, you really need to be able to identify your audience to make the ads effective. There is a true art to this and Facebook makes it fairly easy to do.
In the end, we think this is good for businesses. It will really make social media / content marketers think about their audience/followers and give them what they are looking for and wanting. It will get the “social” back into this social media platform.
If this seems a little daunting or overwhelming it doesn’t have to be. Give us a call and we would be happy to discuss your situation and what you can do to stay ahead of the curve.
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