Facebook’s reputation has been taking quite a beating in recent months with the fake news scandals and the legal battles over Facebook’s privacy policies. The core purpose of Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg recently reiterated, is the desire allow users to create meaningful relationships that have them coming back day after day. On its surface, Facebook was never meant to be a marketing platform, and some recent changes to Facebook policies show that the website is serious about not be as business friendly as marketers would like.
When a post is made from a business Facebook page, that post only reaches between four and six percent of the page’s audience. If you want to reach more people, you have to pay. The more people you want to reach, the more you have to pay.
To counteract this business model, marketing experts had become proficient at getting people to engage with their posts. There were plenty of posts telling you to “like this post to win” or “share this post to get a discount.” After a while, Facebook started to crack down on those practices. In light of Facebook’s new reputation problem, it is completely putting a stop to those types of bait posts.
Facebook is very serious about preserving the ability for its users to create and cultivate strong personal relationships. The “like” button is a device Facebook uses to determine what users like and don’t like, which cases Facebook to change its algorithms to give its own advertisers more prominent placement on user pages.
In this way, Facebook is offering a bit more to the business community. But when you consider what Facebook is taking away by not allowing marketing experts to do their own market research on the platform, you are left with the feeling that it is time to change the way you approach Facebook marketing.
Marketing experts are now moving more towards establishing relationships with Facebook users instead of just looking at users as though they were marketing data. Since companies can no longer lure people into giving responses to marketing data using bait posts, they have to start working more on creating networks of people who genuinely like a company or product, and voluntarily interact with that company’s posts.
Marketers now have to change their approach to focus more on adding value to their clients’ Facebook pages instead of using quick click bait posts to get responses. It is time for marketing companies to spend time finding out what kinds of posts people want to see, what makes people interact with a post, and what makes people come back for more.
Facebook marketing used to be a great way for marketing experts to gather data and use that data to create better digital campaigns. But now that Facebook is slamming the door on marketing people who talk at Facebook users and insisting that those marketers talk to Facebook users, the entire concept of Facebook marketing is going to change.
