The changing rules of social media

Posted by Anton on Aug 3, 2011 in Social Media

Google Plus is great, Google Plus stinks.  The new Twitter profile layout looks cool, the new Twitter profile hides my custom background and nobody can see it with our branding.  With every new change and trend in the social media universe, some people using these channels will be upset.  Until the world ends, we will always debate whether or not change is necessary or good, but with all the social media channels available today, you can bet that the changes are only the beginning.

If you have already integrated social media into your current online marketing strategy, change presents new challenges in promoting your services and products to your network.  A few months ago Facebook made a tweak to Pages where members of a Fan Page cannot suggest the page to all of their friends any more.   Before the change on Facebook, marketers could offer clients an up front paying service where they ca suggest their Fan pages to thousands of their Facebook users.

If one of these invites reached even a ten percent success rate, it was enough to get the viral ball rolling.   After the change, only administrators of the page can mass suggest the Page to their network (friends), while “Fans” have only the share button to post the link to their walls, hoping the message will spread within their network.

Why change?

Why did Facebook change the way you can suggest a Page to your network?  Was it to avoid spamming so that you couldn’t invite everyone in your network to “Like” a given page?  One may likely suggest that this move is but one in a series of changes and structure of the Facebook Pages system.  One change that Facebook made broke the site when “Mark Zuckerberg” was named as Man of the Year by Time magazine.

Does these changes represent a step backward in your social media campaigns?  It shouldn’t.  We really can’t predict what Facebook plans to change next or in 5 years time, but it is important to stay on top of these updates and changes as they are revealed. Rather than relying on “Facebook” to get more traffic to your Fan page, use other social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google Plus to drive traffic to your Fan Page.  Why not start a PPC campaign to raise awareness of your brand, or better yet, create a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign to drive organic results from Google and other search engines to your Fan Page on Facebook.

Accepting all the changes

When change happens, you must not only adapt to the change, but you must evolve as well.  Part of the change means to take a detour when a social media channel sets up a roadblock.  Whether you believe it or not, you do have some options available when a new change is rolled out.