Successful Facebook marketing has never exactly been easy, but it seems like it’s growing more difficult all the time. As of this month, Facebook has begun enacting harsh penalties against business pages that are overly promotional; anything that is too salesy or pushy in nature—including contests and sweepstakes—will now be omitted from newsfeeds and penalized within Facebook’s own algorithms. In other words: If you are too aggressive in selling your brand on Facebook, Facebook is simply going to ignore you—and force users to do the same.
Working Around the New Penalties
There are a couple of ways around this problem. One, you can pony up. The new penalties only affect organic search—so if you want your posts to make an impact, you can simply pay for some promotional reach.
The alternative: Do some actual content marketing, providing unique and engaging content to your Facebook users. A recent Search Engine Journal piece by Larry Kim hammers home on this point. “Success on Facebook now requires businesses bring their A game and deliver valuable, quality content that will naturally excite Facebook users, trickery aside,” Kim contends.
Bringing Your Content Marketing A Game
Kim’s words ring true, yet they also beg the question: How can business owners effectively go along with these new Facebook trends? Thankfully, Kim shares some specific strategies, and they’re worth summarizing:
- Create custom Facebook images. Statistics prove, over and over, that images are best for boosting engagement. Kim recommends Canva and Share As Image as a couple of particularly worthwhile custom image programs.
- Curate and share other images. In particular, make sure all the company blog posts you share on Facebook have compelling images attached.
- Get to the point! Kim argues for post brevity—and of course, that’s nothing new.
- Leverage trending topics. Be sure, though, that the hashtag or topic you invoke is relevant to what you’re posting, and that what you’re posting lines up with your brand messaging!
- Post special content that’s only available to your Facebook friends. Offer exclusive value that people can’t get from your company website or from your other social platforms.
Kim’s most important advice, though, is to shy away from overly salesy rhetoric. “Facebook has declared all out war on overly promotional posts,” Kim says. “Brands will no longer get away with posting salesy promo content. If you want to promote a service or showcase a new product, you better restrict those posts to paid ads.”
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How to Rescue Your Facebook Page
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