Facebook Is Making Changes To Their News Feed!

As a small business owner, the recent news about changes to Facebook may not have escaped your notice. Mark Zuckerberg announced via Facebook: “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”

Although Facebook was initially set up to offer a way for regular people to connect with each other, in recent years with the introduction of advertising on the social networking site, Facebook has always been an active platform for small businesses to reach their target demographic audience. So what does this change of focus back to social interactions mean for your business?

Change of focus
So with the changes planned designed to put more focus on tailoring news feeds towards building and maintaining personal connections, will there still be room for targeted business marketing? In short, yes. Because Facebook will be favouring content in the News Feed that will foster more meaningful interactions – if you work it right, you could end up with even more engagement for your marketing efforts rather than less.

The proposed changes are not a signal that Facebook is barring businesses from appearing in users News Feed. Quite the opposite in fact. It actually means that users will be seeing less public content on their feed such as posts coming from businesses and media outlets in favour of more meaningful one-to-one interactions between people.

Changing your approach
By now you will be wondering what does this mean to you and the way you promote your business on Facebook. We all know that the world of media and technology never stands still for long. Just look at the constant updates and changes to algorithms that Google perform! As business owners, we have learned to go with the flow and adapt our marketing approaches to get these changes to work in our favour instead of going against us. We simply have to look at these Facebook changes in the same way.

You have to remember not to take these changes personally. Ultimately, these changes are not aimed at you specifically, or at your small business. Zuckerberg’s intention is to slow down the onslaught of noise coming in and crowding out more personal and meaningful engagement. If anything, these changes are aimed more at the big brand names, news media and big business.

As a small business owner, you can still use Facebook successfully to establish and grow your online reputation through sharing your passions for your products and services. So you should be encouraged to post useful content that will be of value to your readers and followers. As long as you are engaging Facebook users with inspiring, educational, and even entertaining information, then you will still be working to engage with users and be taking part in meaningful conversations, which is precisely what Zuckerberg intends to increase with these new changes.

Where to go from here
You may be wondering what you should do next? Remember that we are all in this together and will be trying to understand and make good use of these changes all at the same time. This is why it is important to keep sharing discoveries and positive techniques with each other.

The best advice that can be taken here is to continue to offer great value with your content. Make sure that every video and post that you create offers customers something that they find interesting or useful and will want to share with other like-minded friends.

Spend more time in conversation with your target audience. This is what Facebook wants to see more of, so rather than posting a video or a bland press release and then just walking away, take some time to craft posts that pique interest and use topics that can start a conversation. Ask questions, create a poll and discuss your findings – join in on the conversation thread, respond quickly and provide useful answers.

There is no problem with continuing to use Facebook adverts. However, take extra care when using them to structure your advert correctly to fully utilise Facebook’s ad targeting tools. This way you will still get your advert in front of your chosen demographic, but your ad content should be created to spark conversations and encourage interactions.

For a small business where your marketing budgets may be tight, it will still pay you to stick with Facebook. There is no more natural way for you to access a vast pool of your demographic audience while remaining a very cost-effective marketing solution for you.

If you would like more information or advice then please don’t hesitate to contact us here at The Bright Click on: 0203 1312230.