One of the more interesting things learned at last week's Social Media ROI Salon in Redmond, WA concerned the latest changes to Facebook Pages.
With recent changes, the default setting of the News Feed will only show status updates from friends and
posts from Pages you've recently engaged with in some way. Users will have to know how to change this to make it work like it used to. Also, it will become much easier to "Hide" or "Unlike" a page (the earlier design tacitly discouraged such things by making it relatively difficult to do so).
Sounds innocent enough, but it isn't. For marketers, it means what once was free and easy is now going to be harder and/or cost money. It's practically analogous to what happened when Google started offering paid search listings alongside organic ones (remember that?!).
One of the best things about Facebook had been its inherent excellence at generating free viral spread of content through "Liker"'s News Feeds. If a user "Liked" a brand, it meant that brand's subsequent posts and activity would show up in their Feeds indefinitely unless or until the user "Unliked" the brand... which statistics indicate hasn't tended to happen more than 1-3% of the time. So as long as you just managed publishing and interaction well, you stood a good chance of growing a good following through viral spread of posted content alone.
Say what you want about Facebook management, but they aren't dumb. Most of the changes we're seeing appear intended to:
- Make marketers "pay to play" (News Feed, Unlike/Hide)
- Increase marketers' level of control over their own Facebook presence to increase willingness to shift development dollars away from traditional platforms (e.g., websites) and toward Facebook (FBML deprecation, adoption of iFrames)
- Make Facebook increasingly critical by offering easy, effective intercommunication between brands' non-Facebook (e.g., website) and Facebook presences, and between users who engage with those presences and their extended social networks (commenting Plug-in)
The changes mean marketers are going to have to work much harder - and pay! - to get attention in Facebook. It also means brands who have already built a large following are now at a decided advantage over their slower-moving competitors, because the slow movers will have a much tougher time building a similar level of fans. With Facebook's new intercommunication plug-in, brands will also have to adopt more integration between Facebook and their web pages, further insinuating Facebook into users' online lives, and making it much harder for any brand to ignore Facebook publishing and engagement in budgeting.
Brands also have to be aware of some very specific things these changes are likely to cause:
- First, brands' "unlike" rate is going to go up. Now, all it takes is one undesirable post, and the user can "unlike" or "hide" you. The links are right next to the post itself - couldn't be any easier for users:
- Second, brands' organic "like" growth rate is likely to go down. It's going to be more difficult to get viral impressions now, and that's going to affect all value-generating metrics in Facebook - awareness and engagement in particular are going to be harder to come by.
How to respond? First, there's not much marketers can do about the overall situation. As long as Facebook continues to command the attention of our target audiences, it also demands our attention. The power lies with the people, and, for now at least, the people have chosen Facebook.
Marketers are going to have to play the hand we're dealt. To wit:
- Use the new tools. Increase the conversation happening on websites to offset the disadvantages of changes to the News Feed.
- Choose a great engagement and publishing platform and provider. Careful management of content publishing and engagement management is now even more important. If you don't use a platform that lets you measure fan engagement, active fans and
interactions by post, you might want to consider investing in one now. And be sure choose someone you can trust to watch and optimize your publishing and engagement activity (like Gage!).
- Step up efforts to win engagement. To avoid disappearing from your fans’ News Feeds, it is more
important than ever to keep fans engaging through compelling content, applications, and promotions that get them
interacting and sharing with friends.
Alas, the gap between Facebook Haves and Have Nots is about to widen considerably; make sure you've done what you can to ensure your brand is on the right side of that divide.
Got comments, questions, or cries of outrage? Fire away!