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Health & Fitness

Facebook for Business Changes

Facebook is at it again.

Over the next couple of weeks, Facebook will be rolling out a new streamlined look for business pages.  Sound like the social media giant is finally in your corner, business owners?  Welllllll.....not so much.

Here's the good news.  There ARE in fact a few changes that will help you manage your Facebook page.

1.  With the right side of your page featuring wall posts, and the left side featuring business information, this new streamlined look will make it easier for users to quickly find the information they need.

2.  There's a great new addition called Pages to Watch.  It allows you to monitor your competition and see what they are up to.

Of course actually monitoring the competition and engaging with users is required for a business to actually be able to appreciate these changes from a marketing perspective (something that The Silent Partner Marketing of course offers in our marketing services for business owners).

But here's what's NOT so hot about the direction Facebook is moving - the death of "organic reach" for businesses.

Many business owners understand the importance of organic search - users being able to find you based on, in part, your content marketing strategy (vs. paid advertising).

But new research published by Social@Ogilvy earlier this month shows a significant downward slop in the organic reach of posts on Facebook.  Brand reach with content in 2012 was approximately 16% of followers.  In February 2014, that number hit a new low of approximately 6%.  For large pages with more than 500,000 likes, that number is just 2% on average.

This should explain why some of your posts in past months seem to have fewer and fewer eyeballs. 

In order to achieve the same amount of visibility now,  you have to score a large amount of "likes" on your posts to boost organic viewership.  It creates a sort of "chicken and the egg" game - you need more likes to get more eyeballs, but you need more eyeballs to score more "likes".

Sounds sort of dumb, doesn't it?  Not if you're in the business of monetizing Facebook.

Enter: Mark Zuckerberg.

The idea is that you'll be forced to kick-start the "liking" process...by paying for sponsored posts and advertisements.

Yup - the free ride is over.  Sort of.

The Silent Partner Marketing is working with many of our clients right now to implement strategies to boost viewership and organic reach without having to pay for Facebook advertising.  Yup.  We're that good. 

So it's entirely up to you.  You can continue to do things the same way you've been doing them...and you can get together with industry experts and complain about how much money Zuckerberg makes and how he's killing your business.  Or you can beat him at his own game.

It's up to you.  When you're ready to shine - get in touch with our team at The Silent Partner Marketing.

Let's do this thing.

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Written by Kyle Reyes

Kyle Reyes is the President and Creative Director of The Silent Partner Marketing, a boutique marketing firm focused on helping businesses grow in an age of exploding technology.  You can find him on Google+Facebook and Twitter.  He's the Chuck Norris of marketing.  It's outrageous - we know.  That's kind of the point.

 

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