The End of Facebook for Businesses?

In early January, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes coming to Facebook over the next few months. He stated there would be more emphasis on conversations among friends, and fewer business and media posts clogging up the News Feed. 

 Translation: organic reach will be at its lowest. This isn’t shocking, considering how Facebook has decreased organic reach steadily over the past few years. Aside from organic reach being crushed, though, what else is coming? No one’s certain yet–but there are some ideas floating around (like that any links leading off of Facebook will get zero reach). 

 We don’t know exact changes yet, but we do know to keep an eye on our insights over the next few months and you can do the same.

 View your business insights on a weekly basis by clicking on “Insights” on the top of your business page and then “Reach” on the left-side menu. Select “Organic” (to the right of the graph). This is what you’re going to want to monitor over the new couple of months to see how Facebook’s algorithm changes impact your organic reach.

 

 As we monitor over the new few months and adjust, there are a few tips we know will help keep business pages on followers’ feeds:

 1. Live video–Live videos get way more engagement than regular videos. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that Facebook loves engagement from followers. 

 2. Facebook advertising–we’re not talking about boosts. Creating ads from Facebook Ads Manager can be more complex, but take it step-by-step and you’ll get the hang of it (or contact us for some help!).

 3. Good quality posts–Facebook has made it clear content that sparks conversation will perform better. Instead of posting every day to Facebook, cut down your posts to only the best content that’s most likely to start conversations with your followers. This can be a tough objective for some businesses (not every industry is ripe with conversational fruit), but it should be your main objective from here on out.

 4. Facebook Messenger–Messenger is swiftly becoming its own viable marketing channel. Using bots, you can automate responses and contact potential leads with offers or reminders. It takes time to understand Messenger and more so to understand bots, but the time to learn is now!

 We’ll continue to post on this to help you navigate the turbulent seas of Facebook.