How to avoid becoming invisible when new content controls are rolled out in January 2015.
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Doom! Gloom! And more doom!
A recent announcement from Facebook has suggested that Business Pages are likely to see yet another huge tumble in audience reach from January 2015.
The New Year will see the introduction of brand new volume and content controls which will give Facebook users more power and freedom over what exactly they see in their News Feeds.
But is the news really quite as bad as it may first appear?
And what can you do to help save your own Facebook Business page from falling off the radar and disappearing into obscurity?
Down at Smokey Joe’s Business Bar, the atmosphere was predictably bleak and angry.
“Is it even possible for the reach of my Facebook page to drop any lower?” wailed Strange Simon. “I thought my organic reach was pretty close to zero already!”
Smokey Joe himself was in a typically cynical mood.
“It’s nice to see that Facebook is still so determined to utterly destroy the reach of my Business Page, after they spent all that time encouraging me to invest heavily into attracting new followers that I now can’t even communicate with!”
He has a point, you know.
I’m honestly not going to attempt to put a blindly positive spin on this.
Any announcement about a further tumble in reach from Facebook is certainly not welcome news in my office.
The Martin Print Facebook Page is a very important component of our whole online strategy. This latest development suggests that we may have to re-think one or two methods in which we currently spread the word on Social Media about our beautiful marketing products and design services.
But let’s take a closer look at the reasons behind Facebook’s new plans for the future…
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The latest changes are actually rooted in a recent survey conducted by Facebook which revealed that many users are now finding Page Posts to be even more promotional than the actual paid Ads that pop up in the News Feed.
It’s naturally going to cause some concern to the Social Media giant when hundreds of thousands of users complain that the supposedly regular stuff appearing in their News Feed can often be more blatantly promotional than the legitimate advertisements.
In response, Facebook will be launching new volume and content controls in January 2015 which will increase the relevancy and quality of stories that users see in their News Feeds.
A big casualty of this new development will be Business Page owners who make posts that are generally considered to be too promotional.
In particular, the following three ‘breeds’ of post have been highlighted as the types most likely to cause irritation to users, and the types most likely to destroy the reach of your Business Page from next year.
So if you’re keen for your content to stay as visible as possible in the Facebook News Feed, these are the three categories of posts which you need to be very careful about publishing in the future.
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Posts that strongly push people into buying your product or installing your app.
Posts that strongly push people into entering your competitions and promotions without context.
Posts that use exactly the same content as your paid advertisements.
In reality, none of this is earth-shatteringly new.
For years now, Facebook has been encouraging page owners to focus on sharing simply great content instead of littering up the News Feed with barefaced advertising.
The good news is that Faceboook claim that “the majority of pages will not be impacted by this change.”
The bad news for businesses wishing to shout loudly about their latest new product or special offer is that Facebook is clearly taking one step further in the relentless clamp-down on overly-promotional content.
It would seem that the most sensible strategy for the Facebook Future is to pay for your purely promotional pieces via Ads or Boosted Posts, and make sure that your regular everyday posts are creative, informative, useful, or simply entertaining.
Otherwise, you may just end up becoming completely invisible…
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