If you use Facebook to raise the brand awareness of your business, the past few days have seen a major announcement that will shake up your marketing efforts going forward.
There is a huge change in the way business information will be presented in people’s newsfeeds, which means that your business will no longer enjoy the visibility it has in the past. Basically – anything you post will be seen by fewer people!
As a personal Facebook user, you may be pleased to know that you’ll see more of your friends’ activity and less business page news.
This is the main point…
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, has decreed that Facebook’s goal is to focus on helping people to have meaningful social interactions with their friends and families. He said, “We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.”
Feedback shows that ‘public content’ – posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. Mark Zuckerberg basically wants to make sure people’s time on Facebook is well spent and enjoyable.
What this means
This means that the posts you’ll see will be more community-focused from people you know rather than sales oriented from business pages.
Facebook will still encourage posts from large communities around things like TV shows and sports teams. Mr Z says, “Too often, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.” He wants to establish large, vibrant, engaged, realtime communities watching the same events simultaneously. (This will be a good opportunity for advertisers to shift more of their budget away from TV to Facebook.)
How it will affect businesses
In reality, this means that for business owners, the best way to be seen is to invest in paid ads. The good news, though, is that it doesn’t have to cost a fortune for properly targeted advertising on Facebook (and Instagram) to help to grow your business.
My prediction is that, from a Facebook user’s perspective, nothing much will change. We’ll all still see the same business posts in our newsfeed – it’s just that the business owners will be paying for them rather than them appearing organically!
What you can do
- Accept that you’ll have to invest a little in Facebook advertising. Make sure your demographics are accurate and that you monitor the results and tweak ads accordingly.
- Ask your friends and family to like, comment and share info from your business page, so that Facebook can see the interaction and recognise you as a community-interactive business.
- Get into the habit of creating live video content, as this reportedly gets six times more interaction than standard videos.
- Encourage any form of back-and-forth discussion, such as asking for advice or requests for recommendations.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few weeks. If you’d like some advice or help to manage your Facebook or any other social media platform, please feel free get in touch.
If one of your business resolutions is to up your game on the social media front, here are three of my favourite tools to help you on your way. They’ll give you a kick-start to achieving your goal in a smooth and easy-to-maintain way. In each case, there’s a free version as well as a paid option that gives you more features.
One of my clients provides facilities management services to hotels, so we recently set up a two-day stand at the Independent Hotel Show at Olympia to meet prospective clients. Trade shows are hard work. The environment is hot and airless, with miles of walking along aisles or hours standing – yet the opportunities to meet future customers is wonderful. I was working on their behalf, so I wasn’t targeting social media clients, but hoteliers. However, I did benefit from the eclectic range of free giveaways – bringing home everything from chocolates and coffee samples, to a few shiny bags of lovely mini toiletries – and a rubber duck!
If you saw the photos I posted on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll know that I found the afternoon a great success! I have a very generous boyfriend who, like me, is a chocoholic, so I returned home weighed down with fancy bags full of delicious, mouth-watering treats. They’ve all gone now, but fortunately a well-timed birthday has restocked my treats cupboard!
In a month of chocolate-filled decadence, I took some time out, working at the very beautiful Hambleton Hall Hotel in Rutland. The autumn sun was warm and washed the lovely gardens in a glow that was more befitting to a summer’s day. I’ve long worked on the basis of have laptop will travel – and the beauty of social media is that so much can be handled from a phone. It’s a luxury I make the most of in my business. So I sat on the terrace with my hot chocolate and a smoked salmon sandwich watching the swallows swoop over the lake as I crafted a few client blogs and set the week’s tweets.
Back to the reality of the city and, by coincidence, another business exhibition, this time organised by YBC. I had a stand close to the buffet table (of course!) and chatted all day to people interested in how good social media marketing can boost their business profile. I was invited to speak on an ‘Expert Panel’ too, answering social media-related queries, and I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of incredibly interesting business-owners as a result.
Our whirlwind tour took in all these tourist attractions, and more; I’m a very good tour guide, even if I do say so myself. I’ve managed to pick up enough trivia on my previous trips to marginally impress an American. While I was in charge of museums, galleries, cathedrals and high-in-the-sky landmarks, Stephen was responsible for food places – typical French cuisine, of course, with lots of melting cheese, cured ham, locally sourced paté and bread. Lots and lots of bread. (For him, not me. I was happy with a diet of chocolate croissants and chocolate mousse.) And red wine, it’s healthy.
Time definitely turned back this week when I took a couple of lovely teenage girls to Gatsby’s Drugstore in Borough for an immersive evening of 
Time also stood still at a performance of 
On the other side of the family, crazy cute Stephen appeared via Facebook five years ago. He’s here for a visit now, and we braved the forecast gales on Sunday to admire the cityscape from the Sky Garden. London is phenomenal from the sky, and 35 floors up you get a fabulous view of the eclectic mix of architecture and the sheer scale of the best city in the world. We’re taking time out to visit another of my favourites this week: Paris. No doubt we’ll be tweeting!
Instead of attending synagogue on Friday, I accidentally went instead to the V&A to catch the Pink Floyd exhibition before it closes next month. 
We also visited the 
Kathryn’s in Europe for a couple of months, so we met up to spend a day at the 
he’s immensely good company, and stunned me with the title of the lecture she’ll be giving later this month at a Danish conference: Viking Pirate Women! How cool is that?! She’s an expert in medieval literature and this is an opportunity to discuss something that I, for one, don’t encounter on a daily basis. Do you?
I recently underwent three hours of mental testing in London to establish how effectively my brain is working. Interestingly, it’s better than I thought! This will be reassuring for my clients – and my family too, I guess. I popped up to town on Wednesday to go through the results, which showed a remarkable change in what I’d always believed were my ‘best subjects.’ English and humanities had always been my forte at school, college and university, while a distinct hatred of maths meant that I worked in Woolwich market on double maths days during my school years rather than endure the boredom of 90 minutes of numbers. (My mum reads this blog but it’s okay – she knows I bunked off school on maths and PE days – it was fine back then, no one went to prison for kids skipping school in the 80s.)
On a lighter note – but somewhat related as it involves a bunch of people losing their home at short notice – this week was our last art class for a while. Ed and his housemates have been evicted from the quirky property that we all called our home on Wednesday evenings, but which was really his home. The spacious room above a pub was filled with fairy lights, vintage furniture, objet d’art and, for some time, a sex swing… It was interesting, it was fun and, for me, it was a very convenient 15-minute drive door-to-door. If you know of any premises in east London that could house a weekly group of around 30 artists – some aspiring, some professional and most just incredibly awesome, please let me know. Likewise, if you know of premises where they could actually live, that would be useful too.
Anyway, it was such a lovely day. Ben and Hayley looked radiantly happy, and it was so wonderful to see them surrounded by friends and family. I would like to officially welcome Hayley into our family, but they’ve been together for eight years, so she is already a firm fixture and much loved member of the ‘team.’
This band does not do cover versions – they write their own material then perform it in clubs around London. But for the engagement party they agreed to do a full set of covers – including 70s and 80s dance music and classics such as Everybody wants to rule the world. They learned the music and lyrics, rehearsed hard and were absolutely perfect. The sun shone and people danced and they helped to create a wonderful atmosphere for a such a happy occasion. Thank you Mandeep, Saif, Tom, Jack and Ryan!
The day turned out to be such fun for both of us. I can now ease the sails windward and trim the sails leeward. I can adjust the jib to come about and release the spinnaker from its waterproof sheath. I can get into the boat without getting my bum wet and, most importantly, I can set the sails to ‘picnic position’ – the reason being self-explanatory. Ben-the-fantastic-tutor from 
