Facebook might be a daunting thing for many business owners to handle at its best. It’s just like a double-edged sword: in some ways, it can be incredibly useful, in which plenty of businesses swear by it. On the other hand, it can also be a waste of time, especially since Facebook keeps changing the rule of its game.
We know that many business owners using Facebook as the sole means of promoting their business and finding clients. While these people have chosen Facebook because they don’t want to spend on advertising, it seems that this change represents an obstacle for these types of businesses. This type of business, which is resisting advertising, relies on creating good products, and putting these creations on Facebook in a way that encourages sharing. It’s a word of mouth thing. That just takes strategy, encouraging customers to share your business with their friends, and putting up posts that people are more likely to interact with and share. That business model isn’t really going to be threatened by this change unless a huge number of people start paying to have their posts shared in a way that clogs up all of their friends’ news feeds.
In the last couple of days Facebook has rolled out a new revenue raiser. The “promote post” option is not only just for Pages, but also for individuals. You can pay to make sure every one of your friends sees your latest update. The cost is determined by how many of your friends are regularly interacting with you and how many friends you have.
This is potentially a very promising feature, both positively and negatively. Here’s some reasons why:
First of all, Facebook is a public company, which means it has to make money for its shareholders. It has to produce revenue to pay its costs and people don’t really love anything Facebook does to make money, since everybody thinks it’s free. There’s an old adage: “If you’re not paying for Facebook, you’re the product, not the customer”. It’s ironic, but true.
Second, the real strength of Facebook is the platform it provides to communicate to people who have opted in by liking your gear, like ads that convert to likes are ultimately more valuable in the long term, than ads that convert to one off sales, or event attendance.
Third, advertising is good at securing likes. However, unless you’re serving up ads to your fan base, rather than to your targeted audience, it’s likely that you’re paying about $0.80 for a like that goes nowhere. The chance to send a guaranteed post to the newsfeeds of 800 people for five pounds is better than the return on investment where you pay $20 for 25 likes. While used together, there’s a good chance to turn likes into something a bit more ongoing.
Fourth, until this changed, there was no guarantee that what you post on Facebook gets into your friends’/followers’ news feeds. Facebook is clever. It knows you won’t come back if all you see is 13 photos of cats from your aunt’s crazy friend who you accepted because you know how fragile her delicate ego is and you didn’t want to push her over the edge. It also knows you don’t want to be constantly spammed by businesses you don’t really value, who somehow tricked you into hitting like. Facebook works out what you want to see using a clever algorithm called EdgeRank. What they’ve told the world is that EdgeRank figures out your relationship to all the elements that can possibly appear in your news feed using an algorithm that values how often you interact with the person/page, how many other people think their post is worth interacting with, and how recent the post is. If you’re a business (or person) and you have a bad social media strategy, where you post too much stuff that nobody cares about, pretty soon your stuff is pretty rarely going to hit the news feed and people will have to deliberately seek out your content. The stats on this are pretty appalling – most people like a Facebook page and never go back – which means they aren’t going to see your stuff very quickly, and any time and effort you’ve spent gathering a tribe of loyal followers is going down the drain.
This has implications for how you use Facebook if you want people seeing your stuff. Social media success, as far as the expensive social media consultants are concerned, is about boosting interactions with your audiences via posts. This means posting stuffs that encourages people’s response, posting really likeable stuff that people want to share, and trying to keep the discussions going when they start. That’s really hard, takes time and effort, and there are plenty of businesses out there who have killed their EdgeRank by just not getting it (or knowing about it). So this promote post option offers a good start for businesses to “ignore” EdgeRank algorithm. It also gives businesses who do produce good content the opportunity to boost their EdgeRank – if what Facebook says about promoted posts is true (40% more interactions on promoted posts), then it is likely that the $5 hit, delivered a few times, will add value to your Facebook presence.
However, since it takes a lot of the guess work out of using, many business owners won’t be using it for their profile – partly because they don’t think it’s worth it. The beauty of “promote post” feature is that once you’ve done it a few times and you get a good response, you won’t have to keep doing it until Facebook inevitably reconfigures its EdgeRank algorithm.