Not Feeling the Love from your Facebook Fans?
For about a month or so, social media marketers (myself included), page admins, and small business owners have noticed the crickets chirping on their Facebook pages. Reach has declined, engagements have plummeted, and posts simply aren’t showing up in fans’ news feeds, regardless of videos or infographics or pictures of the cutest puppy in the world. The phenomenon has left many of us marketers heartbroken, scratching our heads at our laptops and asking, “What gives?”
Before you start buying flowers and chocolates for your followers, don’t worry, they still love you; Facebook’s most recent algorithm update may be to blame. As the social media giant so often does, Facebook announced another change for how business posts show up in followers’ newsfeeds. While this update was intended to improve the overall user experience for social users, it’s made things a bit more difficult for businesses.
In late 2014, Facebook released a survey to users to determine how they could improve their service, and users overwhelmingly responded that they wanted to see less promotional content in their News Feeds. Delving further into this data, Facebook’s developers determined that what users consider “too promotional” is business page posts rather than advertisements. According to their news post,
“There are consistent traits that make organic posts feel too promotional:
- Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
- Posts that push people to enter promotions or sweepstakes with no real context
- Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads”
Facebook rolled out this update at the beginning of the year, and while it is still being closely monitored and tweaked, its effects have certainly been noticed. So, what’s a forlorn marketer to do?
The bottom line is that this update indicates that Facebook is transitioning from a marketing platform to an advertising platform. You can start including advertising budgets in each social campaign to boost reach, or you can try to guide clients to other social channels that better fit their goals. If you do decide to invest in paid advertising, make sure you set your target demographics for each boosted post beyond the limitations of the simple “boost post” button.
Whichever route you choose, your goal is to give your clients or your business a solid footing online–not just on social media. Quality content and user friendly web design are at the heart of a visible presence, and social outreach stems from there. To keep up on the latest social media marketing updates, be sure to follow Elephant Ear on Twitter, Google Plus, and, yes, Facebook. If you need something to do with all of those extra flowers and chocolates, just mail them to 600 Dunbar St., Winter Park, FL, and we’ll see that they’re put to good use.