What the Facebook News Feed Changes Mean for Businesses

Chances are you've heard that Facebook is changing their News Feed settings to improve the consumer experience based on feedback from user surveys.

Starting sometime this month, Facebook will be reducing visibility of posts that are "too professional."  Moving forward, Pages that post promotional content can expect their organic reach to fall significantly over time. So, what can you do about it?

Employ a social media strategy that generates content that is not deemed "too promotional" according to Facebook's algorithms. Apparently, surveys have  found three things that make organic posts seem "too promotional" to users:

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 exact same content from ads

Okay, Facebook, challenge accepted.

In theory, this would mean that witty, creative, insightful posts would continue to garner the same reach as they have in the past. Of course, many people suspect Facebook is simply rewarding companies who spend advertising dollars since that's now the only way to ensure your content is being viewed by your followers and potential fans. 

The reality is that while I suspect that was a huge bonus for Facebook, I highly doubt that this is a purely self-serving move. As a consumer, I completely support algorithms that improve the user experience and ensure brands are proving me useful content in my News Feed. Of course, I am very likely to unfollow any company that abuses the privilege of appearing in my feed, and one hopes that concern is enough reason for businesses to hold themselves to higher standards of content creation.

8 Tips To Maximize Your Facebook ROI

Some businesses are social media marketing mavens while others are scrambling to catch up.  Facebook recently put together a list of eight best practices they find most successful local businesses are doing on Facebook.  Although the tips were probably written for B2C social media, almost all of these tips can be used for larger companies and 2-7 even apply to B2B marketing strategies, so take a look at these tips and good luck in your Facebook marketing!

Eight Things Successful Businesses Do on Facebook

How to Choose the Right Social Media for B2B Marketing

So your company wants to start a social media marketing program, that's great.  Have you thought about which platforms you'll include?  The order that you'll launch them?

It's not as easy as drawing straws, there should be a method to your madness.

The best social network for B2B marketing depends on the following factors:

1. The audience of the social site

2. Your target audience

3. Type of content on the social site

4. The purpose of the social site

5. The tone of the social site

Read an in-depth analysis of each of the leading social media networks to evaluate their features and suitability here.

B2B and B2C Digital Marketing

I dream of working on the B2C side of marketing some day.  I would love to engage with fans who are emotionally invested in a brand and act as ambassadors and evangelists. 

A huge portion of the social media strategy I studied during my training was based on B2C marketing, which is thought to be more successful and more profitable than B2C social media marketing.  For this reason, many businesses and marketers shy away from B2B social media.

B2B marketing is actually pretty neat.  I rarely have irate clients posting hateful messages on our social media platforms and there is a lot less engagement with our fan base in general making it much easier to manage the customer service part of social media marketing.  And the engagement I do see is very positive and insightful since I am posting thought provoking industry information and not photos of puppies and kittens.

I approach B2B marketing much the same way I approach B2C marketing - provide worthwhile, useful content to people who are interested in the same products, services, lifestyle, etc. as our target audience.

The major difference from B2C marketing, is that I see less impact when I offer discounts and purchase incentives.  I'm not saying those things are impossible, I just have to reach out to business owners and clients to make those offers worthwhile and not all of my fans business owners let alone clients.