New Facebook policies, Is your business page worth using anymore

BROCKTON, Mass. - Dec. 20, 2013 - PRLog -- Facebook recently released the secret sauce they have been reluctant to share until now Dec. 2013 Until recently people could only speculate on the algorithm they use on Facebook to figure out how many people / fans are seeing your posts. When Facebook started it was obvious and everyone could safely assume that when you wrote a post most if not all of your fans would see that content. This was a great thing for any business that was using Facebook to reach their fans. As a consumer you would willingly "Like" a Facebook business page because you are interested in them and want to see any information they are sharing. wether it was an offer or free informative content.

This was working so well for just about any business that now people were trying to get more fans and of course Facebook knew this and that's when the ads started. So now people are spending money on Facebook ads to gain more likes for their pages. Things were looking good for those that played the game right using a good mix of the right content and photo's that fans would engage with and share. The fan pages were great.

Fast fwd to the last 6 months or so and you will find that page owners are noticing that their engagement numbers are dropping and they aren't getting quite the amount of comments likes and shares on their page. Even the ones that have thousands of fans. With all the buz that was circulating the experts did some research and came to the conclusion that only a percentage of their fans were even seeing their posts. Now facebook releases a statement saying it is true about the drop in engagement and it is due to their own algorithm. Stating that when you post to your business page only about 16% of your fans are going to see your post, they call these impressions. They also said that we can expect this number to decrease more and more as time goes on because they are encouraging businesses to use the promoted posts to reach their audience. Yes Facebook is a business and they can choose to run it the way they want to and they feel that you will pay the ransom to get your message out to your fans.

Let the rage begin! A lot of business owners that heard this are just going to walk away and not use Facebook any more. This will most certainly hurt the small business owners and many more, especially the restaurant pages that like to post their specials every day. What about the consumer's? As I mentioned above consumers would like a page because they want to see any messages that business is sharing. Now you are not going to be seeing the posts that you are interested in unless that business decides to pay to promote the post. It's a bad situation for both the business page owners and the consumers that's for sure.

This leaves the business owner with only a few options and one that is making a lot of noise is. Page owners are letting their fans know about this movement and asking them to join their email list so they can market to them via email. Oh but before you go sending that message out to your Facebook fans, you better promote that post or your fans aren't going to see it and you won't grow your email list at all. There are the pages that will stick around and play their cards right by posting regularly as they always did and promote the important content that will create a return on their investment. ROI. This brings me to the point of not keeping all your eggs in one basket. There are a few other social media sites out there that are doing quite well such as, Google Plus, Pinterest, Instagram and Linkedin to name a few. Now is the time to get used to those platforms if you aren't familiar with them already.

There are businesses out there such as Flipit4u Marketing that help get your business more traffic leads and sales via optimizing your business listings for the search engines as well as using social media platforms to help promote your business. If you are looking for some tips on how to use these other social sites have a look at some of the blog posts from http://www.Flipit4u.com/blog-posts/ and you will have a great starting point