What The Facebook Apocalypse Means For Business
Last night Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg announced startling changes coming to the organic News Feed.
Emphasizing a shift to a more “friends and family” approach, Facebook is going greatly reduce and possibly completely remove Business and Publisher posts from users’ organic News Feeds. The goal is to encourage social discussion amongst users rather than simply pushing content.
This change doesn’t mean Businesses will be completely removed from the organic News Feed, but it does mean they will have to think very hard about what they are posting to ensure they have the best chance of being seen. Posts about relevant local news/events and posts that encourage back-and-forth discourse will have priority to make their way into users News Feeds. Clickbait posts and posts that don’t generate discussion or engagement won’t be shown and could even negatively affect your Page’s ability to get posts onto the News Feed. For Businesses that use scheduled posting services, they’ll need to stop focusing on hitting x number of posts a day and instead post engaging content that the new Facebook approach will look favorably on.
There will still be a way for your most loyal followers to ensure they’re seeing your posts, but it requires them to take action. In their News Feed preferences users can select “See First” for your Business and that will ensure posts from you will be delivered to the top of their feed. Obviously this is not ideal because it requires user action to initiate, but it is a workaround nonetheless and you can mention it to your followers.
For those of you who run Facebook ads or boost posts – rest sound – these updates won’t affect Facebook advertising.
The only possible affect we can anticipate from the announced changes would possibly be increased costs: Facebook is reducing available ad inventory within users’ News Feeds and this will increase competition.
While these changes haven’t happened yet, they will be rolling out in the coming weeks. To make sure you’re staying ahead of the curve make sure you’re monitoring your Page’s organic reach through Facebook Insights. Watch to see which Posts get the most engagement and note what they were about because those are the types of Posts you’re going to want to continue sharing! Posts that don’t get engagement? Forget about them.
Feel free to reach out to us at J Miller Marketing if you have any additional questions about what these upcoming changes mean for your Business. We’re more than happy to help because we’re not just your agency – we’re your partner.
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By Mike Peters
Director of Online Media
