People love a good scandal – and while we’re barely two weeks into 2018, it seems as though the internet is INTENT this week on scaring everyone into thinking their start-up is doomed thanks to a certain hoody-wearing billionaire entrepreneur.

Spoiler alert: we’re pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg is not out to ruin your business.

But let’s start from the beginning…

Hold the Line, Caller

We’ve been fielding a lot of enquiries about the impact of Facebook’s newsfeed changes – not only from our existing clients, but also from small business owners who have always managed their own pages but want to stay ahead of the game in the face of this change.

Smart move, peeps! We’re digging that so many of you are being proactive!

In many ways this type of change has been a long time coming – and while the knee-jerk response of most has been to bemoan the fall of Facebook for business, we actually think the opposite is true…

Facebook is actually going to become a better tool.

Hear us out.

What Change?

For those of you who have just arrived back into the office today after an extended break without wifi – welcome back! Here’s the skinny:

Late last week, Facebook announced a plan to emphasize more “meaningful” interactions over viral or news content.

Zuckerberg explains:

One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.

We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.

But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other…

Based on this… I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions…

As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people…

By focusing on bringing people closer together — whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world — we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent.

Read the full announcement via Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page.

Why the Change?

The Zuck has stated that the changes are to create a better experience and, therefore, greater user satisfaction by putting the focus on ‘real’ and ‘meaningful’ engagement with friends and family. Social media commentators have a different theory, though – that the change is actually designed to combat what everyone is referring to as “context collapse”.

So what is context collapse? Basically, because users are sharing less personal information and updates on the network, Facebook has less useful data to help advertisers target customers. In many ways, Facebook is working to correct a problem they created (by previously placing an emphasis on viral content and video etc), in an effort to get back to ‘the good old days’ (when people revealed far more about themselves online) so that data can be mined and used by companies to reach buyers.

This explanation may read a little cynical, but when boiled down, that’s really what the change is about – and it’s by no means a bad thing! Particularly for businesses just like yours.

The Verdict

First and foremost, let’s move past any grumblings that Zuckerberg is being a greedy evil genius, hiding behind good intentions. It’s important to remember that Facebook – like all social media – is a rented platform. You don’t ‘own’ your Facebook page in the same way you do your website. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s other shareholders own Facebook.

Whatever the Facebook team’s motivations for implementing this change, Facebook is a business – just like your business is a business! – which means (positive experience or not) it’s designed to generate profit.

We get it – it can be hard to begin paying for something when you’ve enjoyed it cost-free for a substantial number of years.

So, let’s shift our focus to being thankful for having had all that lovely free promotion and engagement up to this point – and figuring out the best way to evolve with the social giant and employ the best strategy to keep reaching and selling to your audience and customers.

The Market My Company team is currently redeveloping our Facebook for business products and packages to best align with the changes and ensure our clients continue to see great results on this platform. While we’re taking some time to get the feedback of our customers and test a range of options, we can confirm that, moving forward, all of our Facebook management and advertising services will include a paid promotions investment. The majority of our current clients employ this model already with great success – and we’re confident that anyone yet to try paid ads and promotions on Facebook will be satisfied with its benefits.

While in the short-term there may be a slight settling period as business owners get used to the idea of paying for promotion and exposure, long-term the change is going to ensure that users are more active and engaged, and that any money you do spend on Facebook advertising gets the best possible return on investment.

Better targeting typically means a higher rate of conversions – which could mean that those of you who have tried Facebook advertising in the past may actually get better results for a smaller investment in future.