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Upcoming Changes In Facebook
Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer, the ever so famous Mark Zuckerberg, has made a recent announcement about ‘upcoming changes’ to the already-raved Facebook. He had claimed that the 2 billion users of Facebook would now see much lesser content from the commercial world, because the aim of Facebook was to make people ‘come together’, interact and form new meaningful relationships around the globe by sharing posts and commenting on feeds. Since the prospective year, this had been the second major update on Facebook. Perhaps, as a partial attempt to reduce ‘scam bargains’ from misusing its services.The three major Characteristics that he had highlighted in Facebook were; to increase news that the users would find i) Informative, ii) Trustworthy, and iii) Relevant.
This may be a good deal for the community as a whole. They would now feel more secure than they had felt before, but what would these conditions imply for the Businesses and Brands that have been relying on Facebook as their main marketing strategy?
Relationship Of The Business With The Customers
For starters, it would create panic in the business world. All brands and businesses will find a rapid decrease in their reach, watch time and therefore the overall viewership. Sure the impact will vary from pages to pages as it is partially dependent on the relationship of the business with the customers, their services or the type of content they post online. If you have viewers, who have been long time viewers of your page, and can be considered as ‘brand loyal’ then they will still desire your services. In other words, if your content of product warrants that kind of reaction from your customer then you can consider yourself somewhat to be in the ‘safe zone’. But brands and businesses that tend to post content that people rarely enjoy or react to, then they need to be wary. Such users will relatively have a harder time driving traffic to their pages then they did before.In such situations, considering Inbound marketing as the way to go would be completely fruitless. Smart Businesses are aware of this and they are working on alternatives. Organic reach, is now not an option for them, because with it and the recent changes, it will not even be able to reel in the few numbers of viewers it did before.
Businesses – New Advertising Policies
So businesses have already started sponsoring themselves and their pages to not let this change bring them down. They have subscribed for their posts to reach a bigger market and are trying to turn their crises into an opportunity. Sure, the advertising will be much more costly than that ‘free’ inbound market approach, but just think about this: as more businesses- or your competitors leave Facebook, the more you will have a better chance of convincing your prospective consumer to see and buy your product. Now you don’t have to worry about competition. Who knows, if they back out then it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that your market share may actually end up spiking its way up.With this opportunity however, and the cost you would have to bear, try to make the most of it. Work more on the quality of your content then its quantity. Try to make your posts and campaigns reach out and relate to your customers. This is the time to make most of what technology has you to offer. Pay close attention to what’s trending on Google and update your website accordingly. Try to activate and use all mediums of communications- right now, the world is under your reach. With the rapid growth in Instagram, a fellow brand under the ownership of Facebook, there has been a hype of the direction this particular platform will turn. Being under Facebook, people have high expectations. Acting like Facebook during its golden years, Instagram is slowly progressing towards the top most traffic inducing platform and many businesses are using this as an opportunity to increase their market share.
Facebook states that such groups will end up having a greater impact on motivating the overall debates, interaction and verbal discussions between individuals. However, unless you prepare a solid approach, such groups will not be able to generate the traffic you desire to your page or website. Besides mixed opinions, there has been no recent uptake over this regards.
Conclusion
Being the commercial minded opportunist we are, as an entrepreneur, it will not be wrong to assume that soon all brands and businesses will find their way in to the market with this update as an “opportunity”. On the contrary, some say that the community and the media may have a much harder time adapting the sudden changes in Facebook. Adapting is a particular trait all brands are particularly used to. They can find other potential ways to reach the market or come up with a brilliant solution despite the bottleneck. However the with the changes in the recent filtering systems, users will now not be able to use the filtering services they had often availed before. This means more scrapping and surfing- something that they are neither used to and something that they probably do not like.This goes to say that now with Facebook, as a social media platform, we need to focus more on the quality of our content rather than other factors, if we wish to generate our targeted sales. If we don’t, there are high chances; we won’t be standing where we are for much longer.