Social Media Marketing

Are you ready for the latest Facebook changes

Written by Matthew Simmons
Social Media Marketing - are you ready for Facebook's changes?

The observant amongst us will have noted that Facebook have announced changes that will directly affect what shows up in your Facebook feed. Today our news feeds can be dominated by professionally made content from brands, businesses and the news media.

Indeed we, as part of our social media marketing strategy like all businesses, share our own content like this to attract website visitors and keep our followers up to speed with what we are up to. But Facebook wants to change that balance, so your feed will instead be dominated by posts from friends and family, as well as Facebook groups you are a member of.

Whats changed at Facebook and why

The new goal is to help you “have more meaningful interactions”. Based on academic research Facebook concluded that their platform is only good for users’ well-being if they use it to “connect with people we care about”.

“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media,” Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg writes. “And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

Adding, “Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”

Paid Facebook ads win the battle over organic reach

With this move Facebook has now become an advertising platform, after all it’s the only way they can make money unless we all pay to be member, and for any brand/business presence to be achieved, paid social media marketing is now the only option.

Click-bait out – quality content rewarded

For businesses, in addition to needing to pay for advertising as opposed to acquiring organic reach, the quality of content that businesses will be subject to closer control. Click-bait posts and meaningless competitions will be punished by the new algorithm and posts that are designed to achieve genuine engagement will be favoured.

How do businesses need to respond?

So what does it all mean for businesses that use the platform, when the dust settles. Facebook has hinted at what they will prefer from their business members. ‘Create content that matters to your customers’ and ‘Focus on business outcomes first’.

At Snap Marketing, we see this as bringing Facebook marketing in line with best practices in digital marketing via social media and search engines. In other words create good quality content that is relevant and engaging, don’t try to game the system and you might need to consider using their paid ads for increasing reach.

 

Please get in touch if you need more information about how these changes might affect your business or if you need help to come up with new compliant social media marketing strategies.

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