That entrepreneurs and small business, both online and off, use Facebook to engage with their customers and provide information on their products is a universal truth.
Surveys have revealed that more than 80% of businesses now use the social site to reach their audience
However, Facebook has been playing it tough for a while, and has made a number of radical changes in the past couple of years — all with the notion of better monetizing its platform. All along the while, the company has been reducing the reach of unpaid post for months now.
And it is at it again!
What this means is that status updates from your pages are now even less visible in newsfeeds. The company is further limiting promotional posts, starting January 2015.
This was revealed in an official announcement late last month, with the idea being that posts that the company finds too promotional will be limited, as they believe users want to see more stories from their friends and Pages that they’ve liked, as opposed to promotional content.
So what does the company defines promotional materials as? These three, actually:
- Promotion of apps or products
- Highlighting a competition or promotion
- Reuse of advertising content
Pretty strict.
Just to be clear here, we are talking about regular promotional content, not paid promoted posts. They are as fine as they’ve ever been, and will likely will be in the future.
But this new change does make things just a tad more difficult for small business owners and marketers.
While it does not mean the end of promoting your products or services on Facebook, and the untimely demise of social selling, it does mean that you will either have to find new creative ways to reach your target audience, or spend money to do so.
We’ll be going over this overall policy change in subsequent articles, as well as some of these strategies.