"Facebook Zero" BIG Changes Coming

The BIGGEST change to Facebook in recent times is imminent but what does it mean for Businesses? 

Back in October I picked up on a webinar that Facebook were testing the effects of a significant change to their service offering. At the time these tests were being carried out in non-English speaking countries around the Eastern Europe regions.

Recently the visual desktop landscape changed for Facebook seeing a slimmer newsfeed section and a '3 column' styled format (very much like the old website frames) and an introduction of an 'About Us' section in HMTL (allowing more bespoke links and coding)

Then today Mark Zuckerberg made his announcement that the changes were definitely coming:

"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," wrote Mr Zuckerberg

(source BBC, Image credit: ID 49909250 ? Frédéric Legrand)

So What Are The Changes To Facebook?

The major change appears to be a splitting out of Business related content (Adverts, News, Articles) from the more traditional Facebook purpose of 'friends, family, social groups and interest groups'.

In October the source I was talking to explained that this meant 2x separate News Feeds (which might explain the 'Columns' look currently in situ on Facebook desktop). One for business aka "Zero" and one for your social connections.

It was also mentioned that the real estate space for Advertisers would significantly drop and this is born out in the announcement today. So less space to run Facebook Adverts on the real estate screen area BUT a potential increase in relevancy to Users (so better potential ￡ROI).

An additional video was released by Mike Stelzner - Founder, Social Media Examiner going into significantly more detail and his views on 'whats next'.

The video article is also on my businesses Facebook page to Watch Here

How Should Businesses Respond?

We are yet to see the ACTUAL changes but certainly I can see that for businesses:

• Ad quality and relevancy is paramount
• Organic content and posts will need far more research to rank well
• Content will need to 'add to the conversation' not 'butt into the conversations of Users'
• Video will play a major role in ranking and from the tests I understand that videos of 1-2mins who are watched for c.75% of their duration will be deemed 'valuable' by Facebook.

So gone are the days of blindly posting and hoping someone will come along and engage with it. To be fair those days were long gone anyway (thankfully).

And IN are the skills and expertise to analyse customers, behaviours, topics and create high quality content and interactions WITH consumers not AT them. I for one applaud this change and embrace it fully, seeing poor quality posts sinking to the bottom of the feed never to be seen by anyone and decluttering my Facebook News Feed.

In Summary 'Can' The Lazy Approaches

I sincerely believe that for Users and Quality Businesses alike this is Mark Zuckerberg 'Doing the Right Thing' driving towards quality and interesting content for his Users.

So let's hope this sees the end of lazy content that simply is trash for our Newsfeeds and devalues Social Media as the superb networking tool that it is.

If you would like help to create quality campaigns, ones that deliver engagement then please DO contact me: [email protected]htto