Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended Link: Facebook announcement: Facebook's overly promotional page posts in News Feed
Getting your brand status updates to reach your fans is becoming more of a challenge as Dan Bosomworth recently noted in this post on techniques to increase organic reach in Facebook.
This new change which Facebook say is due to research where their Fans told them that were looking for more personalised posts in their News Feed from friends and 'those they cared about', with less promotional content. Their alert says:
'What we discovered is that a lot of the content people see as too promotional is posts from Pages they like, rather than ads', according to Facebook.
Of course the cynics amongst you will think this might have something to do with Facebook increasing their ad revenue and shareholder returns too... They do say in their advisory that they are not increasing the proportion of ads in the news feed.
Here is an example of what Facebook call a promotional post:
Content that is being pushed to install an app, buy a product, enter a promotion which is not relevant or posts re-using the same content - are all seen as being too promotional. To be honest, adding some controls makes some sense since Fans are annoyed by it, as isn't marketing using social media platforms about interacting and 'soft social selling' rather than 'hard selling'?
Facebook believes that timely, relevant content will increase engagement for brands and 'by showing content which is 'trending' and current, can increase engagement by more than 6%.'
According to Engineers at Facebook, 'Our goal with News Feed is to show everyone the right content at the right time, so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them'.
Advertisers need to understand Facebook's algorithms which drive content in its NewsFeed and how users can control this, to leverage these changes.
For more detail and a history of Facebook algorithm changes see this great compilation by Buffer of Facebook newsfeed algorithm changes.
How do you see these changes, as a Facebook user and marketer?
By Susanne Colwyn
Susanne is a Marketing Consultant and Trainer, with over 20 years marketing experience in the public and private sector. She's passionate about supporting companies with practical result driven marketing, to help focus companies on evaluating and driving their marketing forward. Experienced in Integrated Strategic Marketing Planning, Data Segmentation, Customer Relationship Management Systems, Customer Insight and reviewing internal systems, data and processes, to maximise conversion strategies and the customer experience. You can connect with her via her LinkedIn or follow her @Qtymarketing.
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