Back in January of 2014, Facebook decided to reduce the amount of reach that a typical fanpage / brand page could hope for.
They say it’s to make the News Feed a more pleasant place for normal users to be in – and we have to agree that this does make sense – but what’s even more likely is that Facebook simply wants to force business owners to spend ad money in exchange for the exposure they used to get for free.
Various reports indicate that declines in reach of 44 percent or more are not uncommon for brands on Facebook. With some disturbing news even mentioning numbers as high as 90 percent.
So the situation does appear to be serious. Actually, even Search Engine Journal decided to chip in and share their take on what to do and what not to do about this.
The only problem about their advice is that it lacks any actionable steps that real businesses (including affiliates) could use in real life situations.
What they said can be summarized as “create and publish quality content.” Well, isn’t that something new?
They did, however, mention quite an interesting point in the “not do” section of the article. The funny thing about it is that the method they talked about looks like something you’d actually want to do whenever it makes sense for your brand.
Namely, one of Facebook’s conclusions is that people don’t really want to see updates made by brands talking about their products. They would much rather see some interactions by real people, individuals who talk about things from their own perspective.
This means that the simplest solutions for us – affiliates – is to pick a persona for our fanpage and then build it entirely around this persona.
In other words, don’t publish your updates as Brand XYZ. Do it as Adam Smith of Brand XYZ.
And while we’re at it, you might also want to change the setting of your fanpage to one of these:
The arguments that SEJ brings up as for why brands shouldn’t do this are truly silly. For example:
“[…] the page owner might head to a dinner with friends, and pose for a snap with a glass of wine. Later that night, the post might be tagged with the person’s name, and shared on the person’s page. Now, wine is associated with the company. Depending on the business, this could be terrible.”
In our book, having the above occur is proof that the page in question is indeed run by a real person, which in Facebook’s eyes is just perfect.