Most business owners and service providers are well aware of the huge impact that social media may have on their business and a SEO consultancy will of course incorporate this into their overall plans to increase the visibility of a brand. Recently however we have had panicked page owners loudly protesting against recent changes that they presume have or will kill off their following and drastically reduce their visibility.
Across Facebook similar messages to this have been broadcast indignantly by business users:
**********IMPORTANT FACEBOOK CHANGES**********
Facebook is doing major updates and many pages are currently affected. If I disappear completely from your feed, check your page for a new tab on the left called ‘pages feed’ with a little orange flag. We are all now getting 2 separate news feeds – our usual news feed will have all our personal friends posts in it and all posts that are sponsored (paid for) and as for the rest of us who can’t afford to pay for every post we make, our pages will be put into the new tab called ‘pages feed’ which you will need to physically click on to see my posts and majority of all your other favourite pages. ”
Thankfully the panic is now starting to subside as SEO and social media experts have been able to calm their clients and explain that the changes have not been put in place in order to penalise those that don’t pay to promote posts and that a drop in visibility, should it occur, will likely be due to other issues and not to the new page system.
The Page Feed is set up to effectively reduce the number of spammy page updates that users see in their everyday timeline. Over-enthusiastic businesses that clog the timeline with update after update will get marked as spam by some and as a consequence become less visible. What Facebook are trying to do is make it so that users get to see more of the content that they want and need to see rather than that which they are clearly seeing too much of.
There are many ways for a business to maximise their visibility online, including social media and business users are now realising that the find art that is SEO and social media management is something often best overseen by their SEO consultancy company. Facebook, as with other social media networks changes and grows as time goes on and keeping on top of the updates and understanding the true impact of them is often a full time job in itself. To avoid the panicked and misinformed rants, arguments and confusions that have been seen this week, talking to the experts before panicking is better for the blood pressure and undoubtedly better for the visibility, profitability and likeability of a business page.