In the age of social networking Facebook has become a large part of any online marketing campaign, alongside SEO and PPC. Just as how Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm to alter best practices and penalize SEO tactics that moved from an acceptable tactic to a spammy tactic (i.e. keyword stuffing); Facebook is following suit with changes of their own that will affect how many businesses use social networking to meet their marketing goals.
It’s a common practice for businesses to ask for likes, shares, and comments to promote their product or business. This practice has been going on since business started using their Facebook pages as a marketing tool. Under Facebook’s new guidelines, the social networking giant is cracking down on these calls to action, referring to this practice as “like-baiting”. If a business or website continues to follow the practice of “like-baiting”, it will be much less likely that their posts will show in a users news feed.
Another tactic Facebook is looking to squash is recirculated content. It’s not uncommon for businesses to re-post the same content over and over again to promote a product or an event. Facebook finds the repeated visibility of duplicate content greatly diminishes the user experience of their news feed. They found that reducing this practice causes users to hide 10 percent fewer stories from their news feed.
Facebook says that their goal isn’t to impact pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, but rather focus on Pages that post explicitly asking for likes, comments, and shares. So if your business is practicing any of these social media marketing tactics, then you may need to rethink new and creative ways to get people to like your posts without specifically asking for them outright.
Content Motive’s current social media posting strategies will not be effected by these updates. Content Motive is proud to offer unique content on each post and does not bait likes, but instead encourage people to follow on Facebook naturally.