How will Facebook Zero affect your business?

Facebook has established itself as one of the most powerful digital platforms to drive leads and grow brand awareness. The ability to build an audience and deliver content directly to followers, combined with highly-targeted advertising campaigns, has allowed companies to increase website traffic and leads at a fraction of the cost of other digital tactics.

Recently, Facebook has made an announcement, which has been dubbed Facebook Zero, that will bring major changes to how businesses use the platform, especially those that rely heavily on their organic following.

What Is Facebook Zero?

The major impetus behind the new update is, according to Facebook, “to provide people with more meaningful social interactions.” Instead of bringing content to audiences that they have determined will be relevant to their interests, they are circling back to refocus on personal communications. This means the content they will be featuring will now show more posts from users’ family and friends.

What Facebook Zero Means for Consumer Content

For businesses, it’s important to be aware that posts by third parties will be bumped further down on the user’s News Feed. That means they will generally be seeing fewer public pages, such as businesses, brands and media. This poses a challenge to companies that have had success with advertising on Facebook. However, with a few basic steps, you can still try to stay on top of your ad game with Facebook Zero.

Real Connection

It’s more important than ever to actually connect with users. Straightforward advertising isn’t going to cut it anymore. In order to step up your visibility, you have to create engagement. Users are more likely to see posts that friends have engaged with, so if you respond personally to comments and encourage your audience to share thoughts and to interact with you, this will go a long way toward ensuring your sponsored content gets boosted up in users’ News Feed. Who is your target audience and what gets them excited? Think about how you can make your content more relevant to their interests and encourage them to share their thoughts with you.

Paid Campaigns

Presumably, part of the strategy of Facebook Zero is to drive more businesses to develop paid campaign strategies. These help ensure that your posts get seen by more eyes. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how relatable or engaging your content is, the algorithm simply won’t allow it to rise above the fold. Facebook ads will still be served to users’ News Feeds in the same way but the rising demand for ad real estate on the platform might cause the overall cost to increase. These paid ads can help make up for the loss of organic reach.

Varied Content

Posts that delight and inspire people and lead to meaningful interactions are the ones that are going to get the most traction in the world of Facebook Zero. The algorithm will notice the posts that people are engaging with and make sure to serve them to a wider audience. So, as a business, you want to focus on creating content that people will share, posts that seek tips or recommendations, and news articles and videos that spark up a discussion. Also, posts that invite longer comments will be favored over posts with short comments.

Facebook’s announcement of News Feed changes will definitely have an impact on brands. But by adapting to the changes by making sure to generate appealing content and staying current with paid ads and boosted posts, you can still take advantage of the marketing power of this new version of Facebook.