Over the past few months, I’ve seen a sharp rise in the frustration with Facebook over its content display algorithm that applies to business pages.
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In a nutshell, the new algorithm all but guarantees that one status update will never be seen by all of your followers. Instead Facebook only shows it to a select group of fans which it thinks will be interested in your update.
In theory that sounds nice to have sophisticated targetig. But in reality, it is a nightmare for brands using Facebook for marketing or public relations. For example, it’s not uncommon for an update to be seen by only a few dozen people, even though the company might have thousands of fans. To further put salt in the wound, Facebook has stepped up its own marketing efforts, giving businesses the opportunity to “boost” their post’s reach, for a fee.
But even though I empathize with the other marketers and PR consultants having trouble with Facebook and wish it were different, I’ve found three benefits from the change.
Facebook has forced me to become more creative about communicating our brand.
While it would be easy to throw out random status updates, I am learning to change my game plan to account for the changes. I’m learning to become more creative, because unless the updates actually appeal, provide value, and are interesting, no one, except our most dedicated of followers, will ever see them.
One of our recent posts on DuoParadigms’ Facebook surprised me. This post performed much better than others and was viewed by people who usually don’t see our updates, all because it matched a targeted interest, reading.
How does this still relate to our brand? Effective PR requires education—and education is encouraged through reading.
Facebook’s change has helped me to be more proactive in analyzing statistics.
Generating content is hard work and time consuming, and unfortunately, statistic and ROI analysis often gets shoved on the back burner.
But with Facebook, if you are going to be successful, you cannot afford to ignore your stats. Fortunately, Facebook has a great built-in tool to help you out.
Facebook Insights is a free, comprehensive tool kit designed to show you specifically how successful your updates were in reaching your followers. It will show you the best converting types of updates (such as photos or text), the best times to post, and much more. To access it, copy this URL into your browser bar and change the page name: https://www.facebook.com/DuoParadigms?sk=insights.
The new algorithm has taught me to diversify social media marketing.
In the past businesses could get away with only promoting their social media marketing on Facebook.
Not any longer.
Because of the change, I have been able to spend the last several months promoting our brand on other social media outlets, such as Twitter and Pinterest.
Pinterest in particular has brought in a fresh (and significant) new wave of traffic to our website.
The lessons I have learned by being forced to diversify have been invaluable. I’ve been able to grow my own marketing skills on these networks and help our clients make the necessary changes as well.
What lessons have you learned from Facebook’s change? Share with me in the comments.
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