Socialmedialand

Posts Tagged ‘facebook page’

Or just an evolution?

Either way I think the most recent change in Facebook’s homepage News Feed is going to force marketers to rethink the way they use Facebook.

As I explained earlier, Facebook developed an algorithm to display only the most “interesting” posts from your friends and fan pages in your news feed, presumably based on your previous “likes” and comments. Although this is the default view for most users, you can click to view the live stream, which shows everything. But unless you remember to do that, you’re going to see the filtered version.

Now that some time has passed, I want to revisit the topic and look at some of the fallout.

The major problem I see from a brand standpoint is that the new algorithm makes it almost impossible for a brand page to get featured on a user’s news feed. Since each news feed is tailored to the individual user, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most popular brand ever and used to get hundreds of comments on each post, you won’t get featured in a news feed unless that one user interacts with you regularly. I don’t know about you, but even for the brands I love I only “like” or comment on their updates once in a blue moon, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want to see the information.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s completely based on the history of activity. For example, I recently became a fan of Southwest Airlines (which is btw, a VERY popular brand in case you haven’t heard.) They’re running a promotion for fans to win a free flight, and as a loyal Southwest customer I was surprised to find out I wasn’t already a fan – I’d love to get updates from them since I use their service frequently. Anyways, flash forward a day or two and I checked their page to see how the contest was going – and realized I’d missed several updates from them. I checked my news feed (filtered) – not there. I checked my live feed (unfiltered) – and there they were, all my missed updates.

Not sure if you caught the significance of that. I had just become a fan. Facebook didn’t even give them a trial run in my main news feed to try to elicit some interaction – they went straight to the land of lost updates.

This is a huge barrier for most brands. If that’s the treatment that a popular brand, with a strong social footprint like Southwest, gets what about that new page you just helped your client build? How are you going to get any attention?

The only answer I can see is, by paying for it. Remember when Facebook came up with that targeting feature to send ads just to fans? Well, it may be the only way you can reach them now (yes you can send “updates” but those go into a subsection of the inbox and can be lost just like your published statuses.) And I think there will be more [paid] options coming for “increasing” visibility with your own fans. I’m a fan of Pink Ribbon (for Breast Cancer research) and they are somehow able to put messaging into my “notifications” bar. They’re also able to send me email messages to my inbox. I don’t know how they do it but I’m thinking they may be part of a trial run for new offerings (because who’s going to get mad at spam from a charity?) I hope I’m wrong about that last part, because both of those options are much more disruptive to me than simply seeing the updates in my news feed.

Personally, I’m bummed because it cuts down on that viral, discovery based aspect of Facebook. If one of my friends comments on a Fan page – I won’t see that unless the friend who said it is someone I interact with frequently. It’s creating a black hole of updates. As a user myself, it’s infinitely carving away at the amount of content I see. It gives me a whittled down list of updates, and since that’s all I see, it’s all I interact with. Then as I fail to comment on every single one of those posts, it will filter out some of the people on the smaller list, and so and so on. For myself I’ll choose the live feed option to counteract the issue, but unless everyone else remembers to do that as well I think the value of Facebook is going to be ultimately decreased.

What do you think? Anyone out there have some ideas for ways to gain back visibility for pages beyond paying for it? Leave a comment! Maybe together we can brainstorm a way around this roadblock…