What the Facebook Changes Mean to Marketers

Zuckerberg and the Facebook team are at it again, making he lives of consumers and marketers more engaging, hectic and controversial all at the same time.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook announced that they will be completely revamping the news feed. To no surprise, they will be making the biggest social media platform more visual. To all those people who say imagery isn’t important, it’s about time you get on the winning team.

Another change that proves imagery is gaining significance is that when a friend likes a page, the news feed story will be bigger, pulling in the page’s cover photo and profile photo. Essentially, the actions of friends now play a more prominent role in what users see and what they don’t.

 But perhaps the biggest change that will occur, and likely piss off marketers, is that users will be able to choose different feeds ranging from the entire news feed, all friends, most recent, music, photos, games, following and close friends. Right away, marketers should take notice that now instead of unfollowing your brand, consumers can just hide you and you would never know.

However, there are also rumors that Facebook may get rid of the “unlike” function, something brands should be happy about.

So what does this mean for us?

It means that marketers need to come to realization that your Facebook marketing needs to have a purpose and that purpose does not revolve around sales. As I said yesterday, consumers are getting smarter every day. Even without hiding you, the second they smell a sales pitch coming on, they ignore you. With these new changes, they may not only ignore you, but take you off their screen completely. See why the lives of marketers are about to get tougher?

Therefore, we advocacy seekers need to find new ways to break through the clutter of baby pictures or viral videos to connect with our fans. Sharing a link to your blog will not cut it. Sharing images that encourage your fans to share will take priority. Sharing poll questions and answers to relevant news they care about must be done. Research on your following just moved up the totem pole.

Most importantly, strategy must take a front row seat to your Facebook marketing. If it doesn’t, you might as well say good bye to your fans.

Image source: HubSpot