Facebook’s recent pages upgrade has left a lot of small business owners reeling. For those businesses who rely solely on Facebook instead of their own brand, the fallout from FB’s upgrade has just begun and it’s looking uglier with each passing day.
“Facebook took something that even a novice could understand and have turned it into something that even to someone who has programming experience, is a confusing mess all for the sake of more ad space. Way to alienate your users Facebook! Social media is impatient and fickle, best get things simplified or people are going to split! P.S. It shouldn’t be all about the money. You either want businesses to use FB or you don’t.” –Heaven Graphics
The Problem: Customers and friends no longer see business page comments, links, photos, and status updates. Why? Because along with the new Facebook came an automatic new default setting placed on everyone’s newsfeed. The new newsfeed default setting shows you comments, links, and status posts ONLY from those people you interact with most. This means, if you’re a business, people who normally don’t interact with you will not see you anymore. Feeling invisible on FB lately? It gets worse. Facebook has decided relevancy is what matters. Therefore, even if you change your newsfeed settings, your newsfeed will never ever be the same as it has now become part of The Borg – I mean Facebook’s new relevancy algorithm.
The Partial Solution: You can change your newsfeed settings and see more filtered, relevant posts. This will make more people visible to you but will not make you more visible to them. Will all 600 million people on FB make the effort to do this? I think not. But, here’s how you can do it:
Step One: Go to your home page and click the little blue triangle next to “Most Recent.”
Step Two: Choose “Edit Options.”
Step Three: Click the little blue triangle next to Show posts from … and choose “All of your friends and pages.” Click Save.
To all businesses suffering under Facebook’s upgrade it’s imperative you understand the following distinction: Facebook is not your brand. Facebook is Facebook’s brand. Your blog and your website are your brand. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are places where you can share your brand. If you put all of your marketing eggs in Facebook’s basket then you’re in trouble.
It’s easy to wonder whether Facebook knew all along small businesses may not like their upgrade. If they did, then they’re willing to take the hit and nothing will change. If they didn’t, then perhaps these pages will matter: Bring Back Chronological Posts, You Are Invisible, and New Facebook Settings Affecting You. How do you predict Facebook’s new default newsfeed settings and relevancy algorithm will impact brands? How do you predict they will impact Facebook?
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