Publish (and interact) or perish
Author: Katie
Until recently, the best way for a brand to get free impressions on Facebook was to publish from their fan page. Anything they updated would show up in their fans’ news feeds and potentially be passed on to their friends.
Things have changed. The new News Feed shows top stories to a user based on their behavior. In that view they’ll see updates from the friends they talk to most. The same goes for brands. The only way for a brand to get featured in a user’s News Feed is if that user visits the page often, comments on the page, likes the page’s status updates, etc - or if a bunch of their friends do those things.
This puts a lot more emphasis on interactions on pages rather than just publishing. In truth this shift was a long time coming. Facebook provides a post quality score based on the number and type of interactions the page’s posts get. It seems Facebook has been looking for a way to encourage pages to publish more engaging content for its users.
For marketers this piles on some pressure to come up with that engaging content – questions, polls, videos – things people will want to interact with. This implies a deep understanding of what your target actually wants. And essentially, it marks the end of the “at-least-get-your-page-and-write-weekly-updates” era of Facebook Fan Page strategy. Now a brand’s minimum Facebook strategy has to include a pretty robust content plan.
We’ve been search engine optimizing for some time now – it’s time to start Facebook feed optimizing as well. (Thanks to Inside Facebook for that great turn of phrase)
Posted via email from Katie Van Domelen’s Posterous
Posted in Uncategorized
