Do you use Facebook to promote and advertise your company? Are you aware of the new Facebook ‘rule’ changes when it comes to business pages? No? Well, read on
Facebook have held a poll amongst its Facebook users after complaints received that personal users were fed up of having to scroll through loads of business pages promoting their products before they could get to what they were actually looking for, which was interaction with their family and friends! They claimed that Facebook was supposed to be a ‘social’ site, not a business platform. Hence, Facebook have decided to take some action. They have decided to ‘weed’ out overly promoted posts, posts that push people to enter promotions, giveaways and contests or posts that re-use the same content of ads. This will be the biggest change to the Facebook newsfeed to date.
Since October of last year, testing has been taking place on a secondary tab, called the Explore feed. This will produce two seperate newfeeds within Facebook, one for personal use and paid advertisers and one for business and groups use. So, how will this effect me? I hear you ask.
During the testing period it was found that the organic reach to a business page dropped by more than 2/3 and there were 4 times fewer interactions with the pages, simply because Facebook users were not clicking over to the Explorer tab. Facebook have said that they will eventually implement this change with Instagram too. You need to make sure your business is at the top of the Explore feed to get noticed.
To get yourself noticed you will need to put in place a strategy which includes
- Video with a higher completion rate of between 45-60 seconds in length
- posts that are real and topical or trending – posts that your customers want to share with their friends, they will be penalising posts with a negative impact ie, no interaction
- use new features that Facebook suggest to you to improve interaction with your audience, which will get you higher up in the news feed – the more likes and shares the more likely Facebook will like it and give it more reach to your page customers (likers)
Use Facebook Live to make your videos for your page. Facebook are actively against video being posted on their platform that is hosted elsewhere, such as YouTube or Vimeo. They are also activley penalising posts that are scheduled using an external scheduling site or app, such as Hootsuite or Buffer. They want their built in scheduling tool used instead. They are anti ‘outbound’ links – directing back to websites. Also, don’t boost your posts, the conversion rate will become low.
Should I stay or should I go?
We can only suggest that you do what works best for you and save time and money by using proven strategies. At the end of the day 62% of Facebook users say that the platform is the most important and useful social media channel to do their research on small businesses. With most users logging on around 15 times a day if is important to get infront of them! Produce Facebook Ads that will show up in newsfeeds by using a tried and tested 5 step strategy.
If you need any further help or advice, get in touch with us here at marknorthall.com