Facebook’s Big Announcement and What It Means For You

You might have seen in the news last week that Facebook has announced that they will be making major changes to their news feed. Facebook will be changing their newsfeed algorithm to highlight content and conversations between family and friends over posts from businesses, brands and media. In a statement given last week, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he “expected measurements of engagement to go down” meaning the average Facebook user will see less branded content.

So what does this mean for you if you use Facebook as part of your marketing communications? The changes will definitely create a new challenge for businesses in 2018.  If you’re worried, don’t worry, the team at Hush Digital have a few ideas to help you engage with your customers.

Supplement with other social media channels

Whilst Facebook is definitely the biggest game in town, there are other platforms you should be using to get your message out there. Platforms like Snapchat are being adopted more and more by businesses as an advertising tool. Snapchat gives you access to over 173m users worldwide on a platform that is still in trend. It just goes to show that you can still engage with a huge audience in other ways.

As part of a fully integrated social media strategy you should be using other platforms regardless, but with the changes to Facebook, now could be the time to focus on engaging with your followers via other platforms.

Implement new marketing methods

Don’t worry, you won’t have to move all your marketing efforts offline, with the correct development of a robust SEO strategy and constant work on developing engaging and relevant content, you can make sure that your website is doing business for you on its own. If you heavily focus your marketing efforts online and see a good return on investment, it would be crazy to reinvent the wheel and totally start marketing via methods you wouldn’t traditionally use, but with less engagement from Facebook, it might be time to look at developing a more rounded strategy.

Email Marketing

If your customers sign up for a newsletter, traditionally this means that they want to be kept up to date with news and information about your business, product or service. If you are seeing less engagement via Facebook, why not increase your email marketing? This isn’t a green light to spam your customers on a daily basis, but why not look at a weekly email with your recent content? Most users read their emails on a mobile device, so why not send a message to your customer base and hit them directly? Combined with email automation you can make sure that new subscribers are being engaged with without you even having to press a button!

Don’t panic, do nothing & keep using Facebook

You would be crazy to all of a sudden think that your organic Facebook content will drop off a cliff completely. With a healthy follower base, your customers will still see your content. In a perfect world, your customers would subscribe to your feed meaning they won’t miss out on a single post.

As part of a full communications strategy, depending on your business type, Facebook should still remain as a key marketing tool. Facebook can handle much more than just hitting users with timed content. The platform can be used as a conversational tool with customers, giving a quick and easy way of answering questions and queries.

Getting rid of Facebook would be a grave error, the changes just means that some of your content might be a little less visible.

If you are worried about your Facebook content and would like to discuss your digital marketing needs, why not contact the team at Hush today?