“Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”
“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard – it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”
In other words, the new plans imply less visibility for businesses and their business posts. Brands will need to work harder to reach their target audiences. It’s worrisome for companies who rely heavily on social media marketing. So, the question is – how will this adjustment affect your Facebook marketing strategy and after all, your business? Here are some points to consider before you hurry to contemplate the end of social media as we know it:
If you were doing it right, you don’t need to change much
Facebook is social interaction after all. Even now, before Facebook business posts are limited, no one could be successful on the world’s largest social network by posting only promotional and selling posts. It’s just human nature– people don’t like to be pushed aggressive, promotional messages anymore after years of being subjected to traditional advertising. The focus on entertaining and educating followers has already been vital in the last few years and the changes announced by Facebook’s CEO only come to strengthen this direction.
Invest more in your paid Facebook strategy
Many small business owners are using just the free features of social networks and don’t complicate matters with paid solutions. In the next few months, more and more businesses will start to allocate a budget towards Facebook posts and ads if they are going to use Facebook to market their products and services. The good news is that Facebook business marketing is not expensive; you can set a budget as little as $20 a week this can be sufficient to reach up to a few thousand targeted Facebook users.
Create value content
Speaking of entertaining and educating audiences, the best way to do it is creating high value content. Content has dominated the marketing industry for years and it has enabled brands to reach today’s customers using the media they consume the most: online. And all this without making prospects feel harassed by promotional messages. So, content is king, as Bill Gates put it in his famous 1996 essay, and its importance in marketing will continue to grow.
Get an expert involved
Facebook business marketing has evolved in a few years from an experiment and something you did on the side to promote your business into a powerful and complex tool. An expert who is trained in marketing and communication is more suited for building your brand on the social networks, because nowadays you need to handle specialised activities such as content creation and management, budget allocation, content promotion, scheduling, and results tracking. With the new changes announced by Facebook business, it becomes clearer that your social media marketing strategy needs to be in good hands rather than doing it in your spare time or throwing it on one of your employees.
The conclusion we can draw from the plans to make changes to Facebook’s business posts is that you’ll need to put more effort into creating an effective social media marketing strategy, but your results will be superior if you do it the right way.
