If you’re a business on Facebook or Twitter, two recent changes may have you thinking about your strategy a little more carefully.
- Facebook changed the default homepage to the “News Feed/Live Feed” format, and a lot of users are voicing their displeasure. In protest, messages are being spread among frustrated users on how to reset one’s homepage to “status updates,” and many have promptly done so. Once a user has made that change, his default homepage will no longer display messages from fan pages, effectively screening out your business’ updates.
- Twitter rolled out its “lists” feature. There are lots of love or hate reactions to it. Many posts have been written about Twitter lists and how to take advantage of the feature. However, one comment from my friend Karianne stood out for me: “Now I can put all the restaurants I follow into a list and unfollow them!” She is absolutely right. Twitter users no longer need to follow your business. They can simply put you (and all your competitors) into a list for later review at their leisure, which means your tweets won’t show up in his/her stream anymore.
Social networks will always change, and it doesn’t make sense to react every time. What’s more important is to use these two recent changes on Facebook and Twitter as a great opportunity to review how your business is engaging customers and fans. Your customers and fans have choices on social networks, just as they’re free to direct your email blasts or newsletters to their junk folder. What can your business do to earn that space in their Facebook feed or Twitter stream? What benefits are you providing them so that they’ll want to see your fan page postings and keep following your tweets? Once they file you under junk, make your page updates hidden or unfollow you… out of sight, out of mind, maybe forever. Number of fans and follower count mean nothing if your messages aren’t being received.
Make your messages so relevant, desirable and exciting that your customers don’t want to miss it, and it won’t matter what format changes take place on social networks in the future, because they’ll look for it. Focus on less push, and more pull.
One Comment
While the Twitter list concept is interesting, I think it is a positive. I am a fan of targeted audiences. Someone who pulled your store into a list is far more likely to check what you are doing than someone who just randomly followed along. Plus think of what a tool that list will be to other people. My twitter stream is crazy and I’ve found myself leaning on these lists more and more.
As for the FB shift, I would bet this is temporary until FB has completed their new rollout. This happened last time when FB changed. People reverted back and eventually FB just phased out the older version. FB put a lot of time and effort into courting businesses and I doubt they are phasing them out any time soon.
That being said, you are dead right, if you are not creating interesting and useful posts for your customers, you are not going to get anywhere in this space.