Why Facebook’s Growth Plateau is Good For Business
Facebook released it’s fourth quarter earning yesterday, raising a lot of questions for investors about what the changes of the News Feed might mean to it’s revenue moving forward. To catch you up, read this article from Quartz on it’s quarterly report.
What Hanna Kozlowska points out is that Facebook really is untouchable when it comes to social platforms. Although the reports might paint a different picture of their growth, which shows a slowdown in revenue growth and active users, the fact that there are still 2.20 billion active users means that there is a lot of opportunity for businesses to find their audiences and engage with them on a daily basis.
Changes to the news feed was a step in the right direction for the platform. As Zuckerburg continuously stresses that Facebook is about creating interactions among users, not users and businesses. Sure, you might miss more of your Tasty videos, but Facebook was originally built as a platform to stay connected to friends and family. The change means that those videos being harder to see directly from a business, but it doesn’t mean that your friends sharing them won’t give them exposure.
Changes like this create call-to-actions for content creators. It’s no different than what YouTube is doing to their platform by changing their partnership program. They are making sure that users are having the experience that the platform was created for, rather than allowing the content creators to manipulate that with average videos and posts that junk up feeds.
As a business, you need to take inventory of what videos you have been creating. The analytics that Facebook provides is a great first step to analyze what videos have had the most engagement with your audience. Figure out why those videos have had the most impact, and create a roadmap for future productions. What emotions were left on each video, and what did the comments say? If you aren’t analyzing these metrics now, you aren’t paying attention to your audience.
I also recommend looking at what videos haven’t done well, and makes notes on the content type, length, look, feel and timing of those videos. The data may point to the fact that the times you posted created engagement, rather than content. Timing could also refer to the frequency of your posts. Don’t overwhelm your audience with a lot of content all at once. Space it out so that users have time to view and share what you have posted, before posting the next piece of content.
Cycles of this analysis will tell the story of your Facebook audience, and it will create an opportunity to maximize your reach, engagement and share-ability of each post.