This likely won't be news to most of the marketing world, but Facebook rung in 2015 with a big slap in the face to social media marketers. They updated their news feed algorithms to weed out overly-promotional and advertisey posts. What this means for your business: posts to your company's Facebook page do not get seen like they used to. Whether or not you knew this was coming, it's painful to see your post reach statistics down to 1/3 of what they used to be. Its harder to get the pages you manage seen organically by a larger population on Facebook without paying any money.
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There's a silver lining, though. Facebook's changes are a great reminder that we need to keep our social media marketing efforts SOCIAL. Facebook isn’t just another place to push sales and post promos in the hopes that some friend of a friend (who just happens to stumble upon our page) will be our next huge client. How effective are our promotional posts on Facebook anyways? (Hint: not very!)
Now, more than ever, we need to be creating the quality content we should have been sharing all along....the kind that convinces our page followers to stay page followers (and the rest of Facebook to become page followers). Facebook is a place where, above all else, our goal should be to connect socially with our customers. This might seem like a huge "duh," but staying social and interesting on social media when you're using it as a marketing tool is easier said than done. We want to get the inside scoop on how we can really bring our company's social circle of customers and employees what they need. Let's not bite the hand that feeds us. Technically, these people are paying for next month's rent, so making them happy is more than in our best interest.
Think of social media as an imitation of real live social interaction set in the digital sphere. We don't like it when we are walking down the street with our friends midday and someone shoves a neon flyer for a super sick EDM laser show in our faces. Unless you love EDM, this flyer is irrelevant and seriously annoying. Why would we enjoy scrolling through our Facebook news feed only to be ambushed with promos for a company's services we don't even need?
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Simply stated, you want to keep others interested in your company and what you have to offer the world. Instead of through posting promos, do this through a daily social presence that makes sense and fits in with everything else you see while scrolling through Facebook. Your followers will come to trust and respect you when you prove to them you consistently are sharing things of value they might actually want to look at.
And remember...reminding everyone of the same promotion you’ve had for the past 6 months is not providing people with something of value. I am talking about something socially valuable...you know something real live people are actually going to want to interact with and share with their other real live friends. There is a reason BuzzFeed is successful on Facebook and so many other companies aren't (hint: Buzzfeed's posts are super-relevant click-bait that get people excited enough to visit their website. Bonus points if those visitors also comment and share posts with their BFF).
Ready to work your company's Facebook page like it's nobody's business? Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post with my fave content creating resources. In the meantime, shoot me an email or message me and let's connect!
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