Social Media Strategy Needs To Adapt To Facebook’s New News Feed

Published on Tuesday, 26 March 2013 08:23

Darin McGilvra

Whenever changes occur on social media sites, it is important for businesses to adjust to them, even when they have been working with a Murrieta Web design company.

At the beginning of March, Facebook announced that it was changing its news feed. It was making it more user friendly by allowing users greater ability to control what and when they will see new content.

Most businesses rely heavily on driving traffic to their websites by being active on Facebook. Any change to how potential customers receive and view content can greatly affect businesses, which is why it is important to anticipate what any possible changes could mean.

One important factor is the success of Facebook itself. If it is being successful, it is keeping more potential customers active and engaged on the site. The more people that are active on Facebook, the higher the potential for other businesses to reap the rewards and build their customer bases.

History has shown that Facebook users are pretty vocal about changes, and it is rare that they actually will initially greet changes with open arms. Most of the time, changes to Facebook are followed by many requests to return the site to the way things were.

So, when changes are made, businesses are leery about how users will adjust to them. This adjustment period could cause a slowdown until users are able to accept and adapt to the changes. How quickly they adapt to changes will determine how long a slowdown is.

Fortunately, it appears that the changes to the news feed are in response to common complaints by users about how they receive content through it. The changes will allow users to pick what kind of content will show up, and it will be presented in chronological order, so it will be easier for users to go through the feed and view things they had not seen before.

Be the first to take advantage of changes to social media sites

While this would appear to be something beneficial to Facebook and its users, there is potential for it to cause significant problems for businesses as they could essentially be shut out by customers who had previously been receiving content from them. Of course, it could also have great benefits for businesses, as the ones that aren’t blocked out by users will have less content to compete for attention with viewers.

Many popular content providers had already noticed a drop in people liking and sharing content even though they had the same number of people liking and following them. Many were blaming the news feed prior to the changes not allowing people to see content consistently.

With the new news feed, users have more control of what they see, so the key will be to provide engaging content people want to see. If your business can do this, it should benefit greatly from the new news feed.

The changes also focus more on images since this constitutes about  half of what is shared on Facebook. Images also will be larger in the news feed. So, businesses can improve their odds of being viewed and shared by focusing more on images.

Businesses will have an opportunity to make changes since the new news feed isn’t expected to be available to everyone for up to six months. This would be a good time for businesses to map out their social media strategies, or to seek out a Murrieta Web design company that will help them adjust to these changes.

Darin McGilvra

Darin McGilvra has been a professional writer since 1997. He currently writes about personal finances, information technology and sports for numerous websites, including mycashtime.com, mchelper.com, and Yahoo! Sports.

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