Facebook Looking to Reduce ‘Overly Promotional Posts’

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Facebook looking to reduce promotional postsAs a business owner you’re undoubtedly using Facebook as one of your main digital marketing mediums, but if you’re not, why not!? After all, it’s a fantastic place to engage with your customers and prospects and get a really personal feel for everything that people expect from you as a brand.

However, an announcement that appeared on the social network’s newsroom blog last Friday may have an impact on the amount of exposure your business page gets going forward.

Now Facebook algorithm updates are nothing new and are something we’ve come to expect. But this recent one looks set to have a greater effect on companies who have previously been using their brand pages for promotional purposes.

As part of their ongoing user experience improvement programme, Facebook are striving to make people’s newsfeeds full of more stuff they want to see and less stuff they don’t want to see. Some of the feedback they’ve apparently received from the Facebook community is that people don’t like posts from pages they’ve liked which come across as ‘overly promotional’.

The devil’s advocate in me though is slightly bemused by this revelation. Surely when a person likes a page, be it a business, celebrity or whatever, they are signing up to receive all future updates from that page, including ones that are promotional in nature.

Reading between the lines, rightly or wrongly, leads me to believe that Facebook may have an ulterior motive behind this change of scope. It figures that if ‘overly promotional’ posts will lose exposure, businesses will need to conduct paid advertising campaigns to continue their reach.

The social network, however, says that as a result of the change there will not be an increase in the amount of ads that people see. This begs the question as to what will fill the gaps that are left by the reduced number of liked page posts.

So what constitutes an ‘overly promotional’ post? Well according to Facebook its posts that coerce people into buying a product or installing an app; posts that push people to enter a competition with no real context; and posts that mimic paid ads on the site.

Posts like this:

Tiger therapy

Even though the change isn’t due to take effect until January 2015, it’s definitely food for thought for businesses that utilize Facebook to engage with their followers.

So what should you do going forward?

Well one area that still proves to perform well on Facebook is native video. In fact, native videos get some 1 billion views a day! When we say ‘native video’ we’re referring to videos that have been created solely for and published directly to Facebook, and not simply links to stuff on YouTube.

Therefore, if you’re concerned about the impending promotional page decline, but not sure if you want to embark on a paid advertising campaign, why not experiment with native video? Of course, there’s no guarantee that it won’t also be subject to an algorithm change in the future, but at least for now it’s a pretty safe bet.

Twitter and IBM to enable businesses to effectively mine social data

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Twitter & IBM to enable businesses to effectively mine social dataStop for a minute and think about the amount of data that passes through Twitter every single hour. Then multiply that by the amount of hours in a day, a week, a month etc and try to comprehend how much social data Twitter actually possesses. To aid your thought process or maybe just blow your mind, 500 million tweets are sent via the platform every day.

So it’s safe to say that Twitter holds tonnes of data. And now, in a recent announcement made on the company’s blog, it seems that businesses may get the opportunity to mine that data going forward.

Every day, people share a piece of their lives via Twitter. Whether it’s their lunch plans, a cute picture of a pet or a special occasion, Twitter inevitably knows about it. Moreover, every single one of those tweets holds value.

But accessing Twitter data itself isn’t something revolutionary. After all listening tools have been around for a while and give businesses direct access to the metrics. However, until now there has been a challenge when it comes to actually deciphering the data and turning it into something tangible that businesses can leverage.

Twitter and IBM’s new partnership will effectively allow businesses to utilise Twitter data as part of their decision-making processes through a variety of IBM tools, solutions and services. Heard of IBM’s cognitive supercomputer Watson?  Well it could potentially have access to Twitter data in the future and allow companies to answer such questions as, “What do our customers like best about our service?” or “Why are we growing so fast in Asia?”

With access to such insightful data, businesses will be able to unlock previously hidden realms and shape their customer experiences more intuitively. This will allow products and services to be targeted at specific customer needs and wants.

Tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants will be trained on how businesses can best apply Twitter data in their day-to-day operations.

This announcement is fantastic news for companies who are already using social media channels to their advantage and engaging with their customers on as many levels as possible. Just imagine the scope of engagement that will be possible in the future.

Social media marketing requires your business to listen. In fact, that’s probably the primary activity you should be doing across all your social channels. But how can you listen effectively if you’re relying on memory as much as anything else?

Utilising social data is more than just checking how many followers you’ve got. It’s about building a picture of your audience; understanding what makes them tick; and creating material that is relevant.

The collaborative force of Twitter and IBM represents a turning point in social data manipulation. One that will allow businesses to take value from every piece of micro content that’s available.