So a flurry of posts was seeing flying around discussing about the drop in organic reach of the posts of Facebook’s business pages a couple of days back. Upon research and digging up of some of the resourceful digital marketers, the post on Facebook’s blog titled ‘What Increases Content Sharing Means for Businesses’ dated 5th December 2013 was brought to the fore. The post craftily conveyed that Facebook is going to start to charge more consistently henceforth for the marketing that the businesses were getting done for free, based on their content. And then reasonable fury flowed across multiple blogs, of mainly business owners and digital marketers on how this has been a very sad development. There has already been said a lot over how Facebook has taken such a drastic step, hostile for the small and medium businesses.
And of course, the anger and frustration is understandable. However, now that the damage to the system that could have been done, has been done, I would like us to be keen over figuring out how to counter it. Upon some reading and further study about the kind of changes that the Facebook has announced, I have come to draw a few guidelines for myself which might help at marketing/advertising on Facebook over the coming few weeks or months (depending on whether or how they perform over the next few weeks). These, I believe, have a good probability of giving the business page owners/managers a fighting chance in the pursuit to keep the engagement high, or to minimize the adverse effects of the alteration implemented. I have listed the points below.
1. Shift the concentration on quality, from over quantity of content
This, I believe, is going to be very radical towards getting the business page’s posts higher numbers of views. If one can send out even just one or two posts a day, but are attractive enough to generate engagements, well.. You would have your posts in the news feed of those engaged, at least for a while. However a thing to consider is that the number of posts should not be allowed to drop so much that even your good posts get crowded out over the newsfeed out there.
2. Promote certain posts
It has been a long time that we have been occasionally using promoted posts and they aren’t that expensive yet. Because of the changes that have taken place, one would have to resort to promoting posts at regular intervals. Again very keen attention would have to be paid over the post here. It would have to be visual or otherwise something that is bound to generate a lead or at least some activity. The more the engagement one gathers here, the more the visibility of his page’s future posts probably. So once or twice in a week if possible, promoted posts would be a good idea.
3. Narrowing your targets
The reason I have to mention this, is that, the competition for advertising is bound to increase. Since the advent of targeting options while advertising, be it Facebook or Google Adwords (where it has been there almost from the start), I have always been very particular about using them. Gaining likes or engagement of random people who might not be interested in your actual product, or promoting to an audience to which your service is not relevant, is often a waste of monetary investment, and also at times leads to accumulation of a passive inactive audience. Now that promoted posts/pages are going to work all the more over regular posts, the competition might rise and the bids might get higher with time too. So to make sure one makes the most of his investment, it would be great if one could figure out the narrow band of his target audience and then go expanding the spectrum gradually.
4. Start using other platforms if you haven’t started yet
This is something that is always recommended. It is a general assumption (though sometimes, even a reality) that it takes a lot of effort to be active on one more social media platform. But it’s a must in today’s age. The whole social media sphere is very dynamic in nature, and if one is looking to create and maintain credibility that lasts really long, his brand should be up to date across multiple platforms AND importantly be in sync with the specific culture of each of the social media sites. (Once again, having the exact same posts across Twitter as well as Facebook is not cool. #OneOfTheManyReasons)
I have skipped the tip of using blog as that has already been covered as a valid and sound point in multiple articles so far. There sure are more ways that might be helpful while countering this change that Facebook has implemented, and I would like to know any such ideas or your personal take in the comments below.
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