A
few days ago Facebook announced a major
change in relation to running promotions on Facebook.
There’s
no need any more to create an app or worry about stylish designs. Most
importantly no costs involved. Now you, meaning business pages, can run your
promotions on your timeline.
Why
is Facebook doing this? Let’s see:
Advantages of a
Timeline promotion:
- Low cost
- Easy to create
- Great for engagement
- No mobile compatibility issues
Disadvantages of
a Timeline promotion:
- Not great for boosting Page Likes
- No data collection
- Can be hard to contact the winner
This
change relates to a previous but still very
recent announcement made by Facebook where Facebook tweaked the News Feed
Algorithm, also known as EdgeRank, in order to reward high quality content. That
announcement strongly hinted that ‘low quality’ content consists of asking for
comments, likes and shares. Does it then apply to Timeline promotions or is it just
a coincidence?
So,
you’ll be doing a Timeline promotion where you need to ask your fans to
comment, like or share your content but Facebook will rate it as ‘low quality’
and you won’t reach as many fans as you should. Get the point here?
Facebook
is all about making money for Mr. Zuckerberg and his mates so in order to reach
more fans and potential fans you will need to advertise or promote your posts
more. Does it make sense now?
Running
promotions on the wall can be great to engage and reward current fans but in my
opinion Facebook pages should continue using apps as they are more professional looking and in line with branding guidelines, they help collecting important data about fans (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.) they increase the fan base and they also make things easier in
selecting winners.
I'm half-half on this change.
ReplyDeleteI do kind of think that big companies should start to pay for their content and make them consider what they are putting out on people's facebook pages. WIth an app they had to engage a 3rd-party who made them consider what they wanted to achieve, ensured they stuck within guidelines and charged them. Now we will be inundated with ill-percieved campaigns that will probably be counter-productive to SM growth here in Oman.
Sure, the smaller companies will continue to send us ill-concieved campaigns but I do think they should be given a little more space to do so. If nothing else it gives the forward-thinking and creative ones a better space for success.
Bring forward the parallel of traditional media and you are looking at infinitely higher costs compares to minimally comparable returns. To run a competition in a newspaper with secondary support media would cost a lot of money and would not reach the demographic.
The losers in all this will, of course, be the charities and non-profits as well as the cottage industries.
Facebook also doesn't want you to be bale to datamine because it means you have an alternative stream of contact. They want you to know that you only have facebook to get the reach you want.
There's already lots of campaigns out there, most of them not really good. This change will set apart even further professionally managed pages from amateurs, and i'm glad about that.
DeleteYou mentioned it; forward-thinking and creativity...that's the key for success in FB promotions, whether SMEs or big corporations.