Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the latest Facebook changes, the company goes ahead and introduces a slew of new ones. It can be hard to keep up, especially if Facebook is a core part of your engagement marketing strategy.
To help you make the most of your company’s presence on this social network, here’s a roundup of the latest changes to Facebook's business pages, Page Insights, and Graph Search feature.
Business Pages
Two of the most significant changes the techs at Facebook made are the ability to turn your personal account into a Facebook business page and the capability to merge your business page with your personal profile. Merging the pages is ideal for entrepreneurs who don’t want to lose their photos, friends or followers as they create their business identity on Facebook.
If you decide you want to do either one of these things, there are three important points you’ll want to keep in mind. First, before you make the change, you'll want to flesh out the content on your page by including milestones, images and other important information. This way, your page will look active and engaging right off the bat. Second, you should be wearing your business hat when interacting with fans on your business page. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with them, but remember that the purpose of the page is to help drive business, not tell inappropriate jokes, share political opinions or show people photos of your latest trip to Vegas. Third, you’ll need to regularly provide relevant content to stoke the discussions on your page. You can do this by taking polls, asking provocative questions and running contests, for example.
Page Insights
The new and improved Facebook Page Insights make it easier to analyze your company’s performance on this social media platform. You can now get in-depth data on who’s clicking, liking, sharing, hiding, commenting and reporting your posts as spam. Along with these metrics, you can also get a better understanding of your engagement rate among specific demographic groups.
The new Insights features drive home the fact that it’s now more important than ever to engage fans through interesting, fun and relevant posts. This translates into more "likes" and having your posts appear more prominently in users’ newsfeeds.
When you invest the time to understand what truly engages your customers, you can do more of what works and, obviously, less of what doesn’t. What’s more, with the ability to analyze reactions to posts from a variety of angles, you can further segment your audience with more targeted and engaging content in both social and email marketing, which increases the likelihood of a higher response rate to your marketing campaigns.
Graph Search
First announced this January, Facebook Graph Search allows users to quickly find information based on people, photos, places and interests. As of mid-October, Facebook enhanced its Graph Search feature to include individual posts and status updates from other users and businesses that aren’t necessarily in your network.
This is great news for small-business owners, because you can improve your visibility throughout the network by doing what you do best: consistently connecting with your fans.Â
Now that you have a better understanding of how these recent Facebook changes affect your business, you can make the necessary adjustments so you’re fully engaging your customers by the time the busy holiday shopping season arrives. Better get moving—it's right around the corner.
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