New Year, New Facebook Changes

Facebook changes are coming: Is your small business ready?

The New Year means new changes coming to Facebook, and they may disrupt your social media campaign. These changes specifically affect brands, in order to enhance the users’ experience. Facebook will begin rolling out changes in January in an attempt to do away with overly promoted posts. These promoted post changes stemmed from a recent survey of hundreds of thousands of Facebook users, who said, according to Facebook, that “they wanted to see more stories [on their News Feeds] from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.”

According to Facebook’s data, many users see the content from pages they have liked as “too promotional,” rather than ads. Facebook attributes this to the fact that ads are controlled, so users only see a limited amount and users can hide ads they do not want to see. The same monitoring has not been applied to promoted posts. The social media giant said in its blog post that it’s “bringing new volume and content controls for promotional posts, so people see more of what they want from Pages.” This includes a “mute” button, where users can choose to unfollow a brand or simply see fewer posts.

These are the traits of organic posts that Facebook feels are too promotional:

• Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
• Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
• Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

Organic reach has been dropping for years. EdgeRank Checker’s research shows that organic reach in 2012 was at 16%, but that number has plummeted in 2014, with organic content reaching only 6.51% of followers.

So how do you get your posts seen?

With organic reach dipping and overly promoted content being weeded out, we believe now is the time to spend some of your advertising budget on promoting your organic posts. But, if you want to reach the most people with your organic post, avoid overtly advertising your products. In addition, avoid promoting contests or apps.

And there’s really no way to avoid it now: If you want to have significant reach, you need to pay to promote your posts. And when you pay more, you reach more. By promoting, or “boosting” your posts, you will increase your reach through important posts like announcements or new products; purchases will grow by taking people to your site with link posts; and you’ll be able to find new customers by targeting new audiences.

Are you ready for the new Facebook changes? Contact us for help designing a social media plan today!