LinkedIn Summary: Facebook became greedy. When people posted on Pages, the algorithm would not share the contents to users. To make people see the contents, Facebook would ask you to “Boost” the post. That is another way of saying “buy advertisement”. The world revolted and Facebook lost 57% of Page’s activity because no one wanted to waste time sharing things no one reads.
But the company is back. In this piece, I explain the difference between “I invite you to my new site event” and “We have launched a new site” within the construct of the new Facebook plan. Yes, digital marketing in the age of Google and Facebook continue to evolve. Get ahead.
It seems like Facebook is experiencing a drop in its Pages – the largely business and celebrity section of Facebook. This is expected as when Facebook cut out free sync of many contents, users were not seeing things posted by companies. Many left Pages, and Facebook is concerned as numbers have dropped.
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An unescapable fact of Facebook’s ubiquity is that as more Pages and people compete for limited News Feed attention, the percentage of a business’ followers who see their posts declines. Reach dropped 52 percent in just the first half of 2016, for example. Some admins consider it a conspiracy to get Pages to pay for ads boosting their posts, exacerbated by poor communication from Facebook and it telling businesses to work or advertise to get more followers that they now can’t reliably access via feed. But in reality, it’s a natural side effect of increased supply paired with plateauing demand.
It was really a trap as Facebook was clearly focusing on asking companies to “boost” their posts for users to see them. Boost is nothing but paying for advertisement. Without that, no one may see your contents. Many tolerated it at the beginning until they gave up. Now, Facebook wants them back.
The company has indeed come out clean, informing the world what it has been doing. And going forward, contents from friends and families would be prioritized more over those from publishers and brands.
Maintaining personal account now is more important than any business account on Facebook and LinkedIn. They have added social before that “digital marketing” and they want you to be engaged to reach customers. In my opinion, what you share from your personal account is about 5x more valuable than the business one in the Facebook and LinkedIn algorithms. Simply, you cannot hide; your brand is now you.
The company has a plan to get them back by making sure that Pages are not just for marketing but also a vehicle to help companies connect with customers on events and socials. Hopefully, Facebook will let users know of the events without asking for payments to “boost” the contents.
That’s why Facebook is trying to redefine business Pages not as just a mouthpiece for marketing through News Feed, but a destination for customers. Today, Facebook is redesigning the Pages of the 80 million small businesses on its platform and the 1.6 billion people connected to them.
It is something to consider. If telling users that you are inviting them to test your website in an event is different from we are launching a website, PR experts will just have to adjust strategy to deal with Facebook AIs. When the company made its earlier AI update, many companies went under as they lost traffic. Now, they are back, it is time to revisit the models on bringing traffic and users via Facebook ecosystem.
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