Margie Clayman
There have been some pretty important updates for brands lately in the world of Facebook. We thought we would take the opportunity to summarize some of the more pressing issues you might face if you’re trying to promote your business on the social media platform.
Using a personal page to promote your business? Those days are over!
From the beginning, it has been against Facebook rules to use a personal page as a business page. Originally the reasons for this were probably altruistic. If you think about it, a company using a personal page would have a lot of creepy benefits, like being able to tag people in product promo posts. Now that Facebook is trying to make sure all companies resort to Facebook advertising, it makes more sense that they are cracking down on personal pages being used for business promotion. Make sure you start your official company page on Facebook today and migrate all pertinent information there. If you need help, let us know!
Okay, you can promote products. Well, not too much. You can promote your products but you have to pay Facebook.
Facebook has been running hot and cold where product promotion is concerned. Back in November, Facebook announced that it would no longer allow brands to add “overly promotional” posts to the newsfeed. Facebook noted that “News Feed is already a competitive place – as more people and Pages are posting content, competition to appear in News Feed has increased. All of this means that Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.”
Well, that is no longer *quite* the company line. According to Digiday, Facebook is now allowing “product ads” to appear in the newsfeed. As the article points out, this is not too far different from Facebook’s philosophy regarding business pages, where companies are losing organic reach and are being forced into advertising. If a company wants to pay Facebook to have a promotional post in the newsfeed, that is just fine. The user experience can easily be shuffled down in priority!
Videos are the thing
You might well think that since Facebook purchased Instagram, photos would be the way to succeed on a brand page. As it turns out, that is no longer the case. An article from Marketingland.com notes that videos now far out-perform photos on brand pages. The article summarizes research completed by Socialbakers, a Social Media measurement company. According to Socialbakers, the average organic reach of videos has increased to 8.7 percent versus the organic reach of photos, which has fallen to 3.7 percent. It is interesting to ponder what has made the power of photos decrease so dramatically. Perhaps the movement of videos in the newsfeed is enough to capture more attention. The important thing for companies is not simply to shift to video but to make sure the videos are meaningful with clear calls to action so that the videos provide benefits for both the Facebook viewer and the company.
We hope these update are helpful to you. Again, if you need any help figuring all of this out, we are just a click away!
[Photo Credit: Master OSM 2011]
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