Facebook Update Will Affect Advertisements

Facebook announced on June 29^th it will be limiting the amount of content pages relating to business, celebrities and media publishers a user is following. Instead, Facebook will feature more posts from friends and family on each individual’s News Feed. USA.com spoke with Adam Mosseri, Vice President for product management at Facebook to get more information; Mosseri explained, “Maintaining a relevant and interesting News Feed is important to satisfying users.” Think about when you’re on your Facebook News Feed, what are you seeing the most of? Is it ads, friend’s updates, or something else? I know when I log in to mine, I see mostly news stories, advertisements and not much from my friends. We have to go and “creep” by searching their name and going to their page to see what they are up to instead of seeing it right in our News Feed or, we have to scroll for what feels like an eternity just to run across our friends. Facebook knows we want to see what our friends are up to because those updates are important to us. When you or others have many connections, it is important to see your connections to interact with them. Facebook is doing this update to make the News Feed quality better for the user, so they can see more of what they want to see. You might be saying to yourself, well great, I want to see my friend’s updates, but what about for my business? The impact of the reach of your page will vary depending on the make-up of your audience and the content they enjoy seeing. It is still just as important, if not more important, to share relevant content, but also to use the advertising tools Facebook provides to help get your message out there. At Mudd, we believe creating enjoyable content is important no matter the platform. You want your customers to enjoy viewing your information and to be able to engage with it, not just skip over it because they’ve seen nothing from their friends and that’s what they are on the hunt for. These Facebook changes mean that creative and content need to be better than ever to increase the number of individuals consuming content on their mobile device. Both organic content and paid advertisements are important to the health of your page, but this doesn’t mean you should be posting organic just to post, or only posting advertisements to your page. You need both! The big take away here is relevancy. Make your post and ad relevant to your potential viewers to get them to engage with or click on your brand. If the content is engaging, Facebook users will want to consume it, so it will still show up on their News Feed.