On the 29th June, Facebook announced another tweak to its News Feed that effects which stories and updates users get to see. Facebook’s engineering director Lars Backstrom has written on Facebook’s blog, “We’ve heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends…so the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed”. Whilst this might be an improvement for personal use, how does this change affect business users?
Download our B2B Facebook Marketing Report.
The Shareability Factor
This update is the second in 18 months to affect the News Feed reach and referral traffic which has led to a decline in visibility for Business Pages. You can read our initial post from May 2016 about B2B Facebook Marketing here. So, what does this new update mean in reality? Facebook always encourages its business users to post relevant and engaging content that will attract their target audience. According to Facebook, if the majority of your referral traffic is from people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting then your business will see less of an impact than if your page gets most of its traffic directly from your page posts alone.
Pay to Play
If you post regularly to Facebook you need to carefully consider your post content to ensure that its shareable and is seen as having value, not only to your page followers but to their followers too. If you’re not already on board with content marketing then you can get started here. Our B2B Facebook Marketing report showed us that businesses cannot rely on organic traffic alone, so if you’re already using Facebook Ads as part of your online marketing strategy then you may need to consider adjusting your tactics and reconsidering not only what content you post but whether you choose to use Facebook’s ‘Promote Page’ Ad’s or ‘Boost Post’ Ad’s. If you are not currently advertising, this update suggests that carefully curating your page posts will only get you so far, so adopting a paid approach is the only way to guarantee visibility.
At Napier, we undertook our own 3-month research project at the beginning of the year to monitor the success of Facebook ad’s and how their use affected brand visibility and engagement. This research was invaluable as we used real data which means greater insight.
