All businesses that refuse to work on their SEO and rely solely on Facebook for traffic generation will definitely have a slow run this year.
Mark Zuckerberg have just announced on his Facebook wall that Facebook will now shift to concentrate on its primary purpose of connecting families and friends.
He pointed that the social media company received several complains of too many ads been shown on their timeline thereby causing them to miss posts shared by their loved ones.
He stated that users complain against too many public posts especially on contents they have less interest on.
He also noted that it’s quite understandable why things turn out that way because businesses where taking advantage of Facebook traffic but this he insinuated will reduce drastically and more concentration on users close connections.
How does this Facebook new changes affect businesses?
Late last night, I shared an article on our business page and also shared this article to some niche group I belong but surprisingly, I got far less reach and no engagement yet after 6 hours of posting and sharing the content.
What this translates to is that Facebook team has already implemented this change.
On the other side, I shared a live video which was of very low quality yesterday from an event I attended and noticed more views than I normally get irrespective of the low quality of the video due to bad internet connection.
I also shared another video on the speech of Femi Fani-Kayode at the event and this content seem to be getting more views than normal for me and higher reach.
My findings show that contents shared on our personal timelines will garner more reach and engagements than contents shared on pages (business or personal).
Many Facebook ad experts are already reacting negatively to this new development and citing that business pages and promoted contents are the main revenue generation for Facebook and that it was totally unfair of the social media company to toll such line.
A verified Facebook users, Jared Guyness replied to Mark on his timeline,
“We shall see how this implements overall. I’ve directed more than $1,000,000 into FB since 2009. We’ve spent years and thousands of dollars building brand pages, online communities and following for our clients. We’ve already seen them reach less, and less and less of their audience. It’s common to see a page with 100,000 likes have a reach of 1500-3,000. 3%? Come on. And now, this will be further reduced? People make FB possible, but the companies paying into the ad manager pay the bills for everything we see here. Please do not even further restrict and constrain active, engaged and responsible businesses for just trying to reach the people who liked their page to see their content in the first place. That all said, still an ardent and vocal support of FB. Thanks Mark!”
Another user was also against Facebook allowing other users add them to their group without their consent.
What then is the way forward?
I need you thoughts.
