Exclusive Facebook news - ‘Facebook Zero’ is coming soon

17 Jul 2015

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Here’s some exclusive Facebook news that you won’t have read elsewhere that I’ve learned from conversations with senior Facebook employees. It’s particularly significant for small UK businesses, who aren’t currently advertising with Facebook and who are relying on ‘organic reach’. Read on to find out more.

‘Facebook zero’ is happening - FACT
For some time Facebook’s organic reach (the number of people who see posts from Pages) has been declining. In March last year Social@Ogilvy published a in-depth study of 100 brand Pages with 48+ million fans, showing that for some brands organic reach was as low as 2%. Marketers and social media experts have been speculating that at some point no one will see posts directly from a Page post on their Home page. Facebook zero is indeed fact and is likely to happen in the UK before the end of this year. In fact, it has already been reached in some countries.

So with no direct posts appearing in news feeds, how can you make your posts and indeed your business and its products more visible on Facebook? Here are 5 ideas:

1) Advertise - The fact is Facebook Ads work and are good value. Sponsor (boost) posts to extend their reach but don’t waste your money on ‘Facebook Like Ads’. There is no point in paying to grow your audience if they’re not going to see posts in their feeds.

2) Use Facebook Groups - join and contribute to Facebook Groups. You can share your Posts into Groups and extend their visibility. Read more about using Facebook Groups.

3) Encourage Sharing - if your post is engaging enough people will share it to their profiles. This is a powerful action as it places the post permanently on their Timeline plus their Friends receive a notification. You can’t make sharing a condition for entering a competition but there’s nothing in Facebook’s T and Cs stopping you from asking people to share.

4) Run campaign and competitions - use Facebook Apps to set up discount coupons, quizzes and competitions that will attract people to your Page. Try ShortStack to set these up.

5) Optimise your Page - make your Facebook Page a destination that people want to visit by adding video, photos and completing milestones to tell your story. Optimise for Facebook Search and Search Engines like Google so that it will show up higher in results.

To learn how to use Facebook for your business following these changes, come along to my workshop in the Gloucester Growth Hub on 9 September - INFO AND BOOKING.

In the light of this news, if you are not currently advertising with Facebook, will you now do so? Let me know in the Comments below.