From January 2015, Facebook to ensure brands pay for posts

NEW DELHI: Come January, Facebook users will be breathing a sigh of relief. The company is making sure that it trims down pushed or promoted posts from company pages on a user's news feeds but businesses will bear the brunt.

Companies that have spent lakhs of rupees acquiring fans on the social networking site will now have to advertise every single post. Critics say by disallowing interactions or making posts paid, Facebook is questioning the basis on which it was created, i.e. to be a social network where interactions can happen.

Simply put, there will be a few major changes that will affect the way businesses interact on the platform — companies will have limited ability to promote contests or campaigns here and, more importantly, Facebook has banned 'like-gating', which allowed brands to instruct users to like pages as a way to unlock content or enter contests. By making the algorithm change, Facebook can no longer be relied on to drive traffic to campaigns.

Some firms are planning to set up their own micro-sites and only occasionally advertise on Facebook to redirect to their pages. FMCG firms such as Big Bazaar that spend nearly 30% of their digital marketing budget on Facebook are looking to reinvent strategy altogether by pushing fewer, yet more intelligent posts on Facebook. IT company Dell will only post around trending topics on its page in 2015. Facebook assures users that its latest algorithm tweak "will not increase the number of ads". However, it is expected that the move will significantly increase Facebook’s ad revenues.
The company relies on mobile advertising to 1.12 billion users for 66% of advertising revenue. A representative of Facebook India reiterated the global strategy. "Going forward, as the network grows, advertising will be the predominant way companies will engage with a larger audience and that will increase their targeted reach too," said the representative.

Mumbai-based social media company Gozoop's CEO Ahmed Naqvi says most of its clients are aware of the move and therefore have started to consider making micro-sites of their own to promote content. "It's time we started looking at other potential platforms and creating our own brand properties,” he explains. According to its latest results, the social network earned $3.2 billion in revenue in Q3 this year and total user count grew 2.2% to 1.3 billion monthly users. Brands are gearing up to change their existing strategies.

Ritu Gupta, director, marketing, at Dell India, says brands will now switch from 'push' marketing to a 'pull' strategy. Content marketing will become the focus, she said. "Organic post reach has and will drop further than now and brands will activate influencers/ambassadors to amplify content. We will be using content based on trending topics that fans would be interested to engage in," she explains. Digitally evolved brands active on the medium may have anticipated this change as in the last few years, the reach of organically pushed posts have drastically declined.