In an effort to cater to Facebook users Facebook has a major change coming that will affect millions of businesses that use Facebook to drive traffic for sales and conversions.
In November Facebook made an announcement that stated that it is going to change how your news feed posts that are used for the purpose of:
1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context.
3. Posts that reuse the same content from ads
A couple examples of the type of ads they are describing:
Per Facebook’s changes the problem with this ad is the part directing people to purchase their Season 1 DVD set.
Per Facebook’s changes the problem with this ad is the part directing people to purchase and install the app.
These changes are going to force businesses to purchase more ads from Facebook if you want to promote any type of the above ads. This does two things 1) increases revenue for Facebook and their shareholders 2) allows Facebook to have control over what “advertisement” content users are seeing. Basically Facebook is forcing business to “pay to play”.
Per Facebook’s statement the reason behind this is:
“One of the main reasons people come to Facebook is to see what’s happening in their News Feeds. Our goal with News Feed has always been to show people the things they want to see. That’s why we often look to people on Facebook to tell us how we can improve. As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their News Feeds. People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.
We dug further into the data to better understand this feedback. What we discovered is that a lot of the content people see as too promotional is posts from Pages they like, rather than ads. This may seem counterintuitive but it actually makes sense: News Feed has controls for the number of ads a person sees and for the quality of those ads (based on engagement, hiding ads, etc.), but those same controls haven’t been as closely monitored for promotional Page posts. Now we’re bringing new volume and content controls for promotional posts, so people see more of what they want from Pages.”
Moving into 2015 Facebook is still the #1 place to go for businesses to advertise their products or services. Even with this major change Facebook still has the most highly targeted advertising capabilities and the largest diverse audience you will find anywhere. In the 3rd quarter of 2014 Facebook had reported that is has 1.35 Billion active users on Facebook and this number continues to climb.
Facebook continues to be a great avenue to market on with a little training or by hiring the right company to assist you; you will be able to use this powerful platform to reach millions of people when promoting your business.
Written by Skye Hawk, Smart To Finish Diva
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