As you would be aware, Facebook has recently announced a set of changes to the platform, most of which have already been rolled out. The most major one of these is probably the overhaul of personal profiles on the popular social site into the new ‘Timeline’ format. Though many of these changes apparently are geared towards developers, marketers need to realize the fact that such ‘aesthetic’ tweaks would eventually affect the way users navigate the popular networking platform.
Consistency in terms of both functionality and appearance is important to it. And the idea is to make Pages that much more consistent with the new Timeline. It is expected to help brands to narrate a story. Profiles will compile posts of a user into one seamless post, organizing them by timeliness.
Because brand pages have, in the past, taken on the appearance of user profiles, it remains to be seen how statuses like promotions are organized. In essence, relevance, will now take a new dimension because users will enjoy near-complete control over what posts and data is shared with them. The ones deemed less relevant, will get banished to the Ticker. So it’s going to be challenge for marketers.
So, to what extent the changes made to the News Feed and also the addition of the ticker will impact fan marketing? Will pages actually reach their fans and will it be worth spending ad money for the purpose of building fan bases? The debate is on. Experts are waiting for more factual data to conclude if the changes will end up reducing the Facebook page posts visibility to fans.
A section of digital marketing analysts have assumed that the news feed will be even harder on pages, which draw low feedback rates on their posts, so page posting best practices now become that much more vital. The advisable thing to do for now is to focus on attaining higher feedback rates through a few consistently quality posts each day.
The blending of both recent & top news obviously means the more frequent posting will give you a greater advantage in terms of visibility. However, this can work other way round. Don’t let the tendency of putting up as many posts as possible over take the qualitative element of your post.
Keep the content engaging, attention grabbing and user friendly or else your feedback rate will get seriously affected and might well keep your regular posts from penetrating into top news. More frequent Posting will help you provided you’re hitting an EdgeRank threshold, which makes your brand visible to fans.
Why don’t you join the discussion and let other readers know how you feel that Timeline and changes is going to have an impact on businesses in terms of fan marketing on Facebook? Your feedback will indeed be of great value…
