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What Facebook Changes Mean for Social Media

facebook advertising changes As many business Facebook users may have noticed, Facebook recently announced changes to how they select what content appears in newsfeeds, resulting in a decline in organic reach for many businesses. Each Facebook user sees an average of 1500 stories on their newsfeed every day and 75% of those users are accessing Facebook with a mobile device. With such a small space to view info, Facebook has reconsidered its algorithm in terms of what appears on each person’s individual newsfeed. It is impossible to understand exactly how they do this since there are thousands of factors that help choose what gets a spot on the newsfeed. Ultimately, Facebook doesn’t want the same thing to happen that occurred with MySpace when the social network eventually became a free-for-all. Now as a public company, Facebook needs to focus on bringing in advertising dollars. Really, it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. We have had it pretty great on Facebook so far, but the gig is up and the honeymoon is over in regards to free advertising. However, Facebook advertising is still very cost effective compared to many other forms of traditional advertising. There are still so many advantages to using Facebook as a marketing tool. For as little as $5 a day, marketers can promote the content that they have already posted and created. There are endless opportunities to drive traffic back to your website and easy ways to engage with customers by running online contests and other interactive campaigns. Not to mention, SEO is tied to social media more than ever as Google is looking at social media to help rank search results. The shift isn’t something to be concerned about really, it is just a sign of a changing industry. Social media has grown from a purely social avenue for individuals to interact, to a platform used just as much for business purposes. Paid social will eventually be a requirement for almost all business, but it should just be looked at as another piece of the puzzle when composing a marketing or ad spend budget. When adapting to this change in this industry, it is important to adjust accordingly. One suggestion to help attract attention to social media pages is to continue with a strong focus on content no matter if it is visual or written. No matter how much you pay to boost something, you could still face low engagement or even negative feedback if the content isn’t quality. What we have come to know and love about social media marketing on Facebook is changing, but adapting isn’t hard, it’s just different. Social media is where customers are choosing to interact first instead of reaching out by phone or email, and research is showing that consumers consult social media before buying, so it is imperative that we take advantage of new marketing opportunities as they arise, even if we have to adjust our strategies just a bit.