A few months ago, Facebook announced it would update its algorithm for ordering users’ timelines. Its goals were to favor relevant updates in timelines and prioritize friends’ profiles over company Fan Pages.
These two principles became top priorities for the Silicon Valley company. Months after the algorithm change, it’s time to analyze the current state of company pages on Facebook.
How has the Facebook algorithm change had an impact?
A change to Facebook’s famous algorithm that many dubbed Faceboocalype, a clear nod to the change made to Google’s algorithm around the same time, which was named Mobilegeddon.
A doom-laden reference that makes us think about the real scope of this new change. Facebook has always sought to make users’ timelines more “friendly”, as it has always been seen as a social network for family and close contacts. This caused the visibility of company pages to drop noticeably, and now we understand the doom-laden tone surrounding this change.
Improving the user experience has become a mantra repeated at Facebook headquarters. As a result, posts from corporate pages, whether from large or small companies, have been affected, as the organic reach of their posts has dropped drastically.
“This change will not increase the number of ads people see in their News Feeds,” as Facebook pointed out and as reported by PuroMarketing. “The idea is to increase the relevance and quality of stories overall, including Page posts, that people see in their News Feed.” These statements from Facebook executives were a response to complaints from many companies with a page on the social network, which had seen an all too obvious loss of organic reach.
What do I do with my Fan Page?
This is a good question, especially for anyone who has a fan page for their company, or for Social Media managers such as community managers. Although it is getting harder and harder to compete with posts from friends and family, there will always be a small and coveted space for corporate pages. So we shouldn’t give up: we need to keep creating content and, even though there is clearly little we can do about the changes on this social network, we can still carry out a strategy based on two key points:
- Quality content
You need to keep investing in creating quality, valuable information for the followers of your Facebook pages. Truly relevant content where informative value comes first: news, useful tips, company information, etc.
You need to keep working on loyalty, interaction and promotion on your Facebook pages so that this information is relevant and boosts the organic reach of your posts.
- Invest in advertising
Facebook Ads, as we’ll discuss later, becomes a way out for fan pages to reach potential customers through the social network. With Facebook Ads you can create campaigns that are much cheaper than on other channels such as Google Adwords, and use them for different goals: improving company branding, generating leads or increasing conversions.
A commitment to keep creating quality content to maximize the organic reach of posts, with the small (big) help of boosting the brand through Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads as the solution for Fan Pages?
After analyzing all the data, we’re led to think that if we have a company fan page and we know its organic content won’t rank better in the timeline, the only option left is to invest in Facebook advertising.
We don’t know whether this new algorithm change was also intended to make companies invest more in Facebook Ads. What we do know is that in recent months we’ve seen many changes and updates to Facebook Ads advertising, such as the rise in Cost per Click (CPC), the new Ads Manager design, the addition of conversion tracking tools (conversion pixel) and the launch of Remarketing on the social network itself, which leads us to think these algorithm changes were designed to bring more companies into the world of Facebook advertising.
At Trilogi we know the benefits any eCommerce can achieve by investing in Facebook Ads, as our campaigns have delivered great results in followers, conversions and fan engagement.
Given the changes we’ve seen across social networks, and those still to come, all we can do is adapt as well as possible and try to create the most relevant content to build a strong social media presence. Even if that means investing in Facebook Ads.
What about you? Would you invest in Facebook Ads to reach more potential customers?
Image credits: adespresso.com, socialmediatoday.com
