Facebook has the huge user base and constant traffic that marketers love to see when putting their faith into a social media network. Trusting Facebook with social presence and advertising so far has been easy for marketers, since they usually see decent user engagement levels. However, there has apparently been some problems that marketers have been facing, and one of them is the reach that their pages have. Brands especially struggle with the reach that Facebook lends, since they rely heavily on their Facebook pages to inform consumers and potential customers of the newest and most exciting on-goings of their companies. Now, Facebook has apparently taken a step toward a solution.
In an article from Marketing Land, the company tells of a new feature that Facebook has been working on for a while now. The new feature is called Page Notifications, and it works in a similar way to the Close Friends feature that Facebook has seen good attitudes toward recently.
Even if a user likes a page, it does not mean that every post made by that brand’s page will be seen, and that is part of what is hurting the reach of brand pages on the network. After all, what good is a page fan if they do not see any of the content? Now, with Page Notifications, users can opt in to receive notifications any time a brand page posts anything. That way, nothing will be missed by users who opt in to Page Notifications.
The feature is not only allowed for use with brand pages, as users can get notifications from any page, but the feature will help brands most out of anyone. Here is the statement that Facebook made to Marketing Land regarding the new Page Notifications function,
“We are currently rolling out the ability for people to receive notifications from specific pages, friends or public figures that they are connected to. This feature will help people keep up with the people and things that they care about most.”
The company has also included something that Mark Cuban wrote regarding the weakening of Facebook’s user reach. The Maverick’s owner seems to think that Facebook is going downhill with their marketing efforts, due to their poor reach. Here is his post from Twitter,
FB is blowing it ? This is the first step.. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new Myspace as primary site twitter.com/mcuban/status/…
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 27, 2012
Facebook may look bad these days, but the truth is that marketers need the network, as no other social media platform brings in the traffic that Facebook does. Also, the company’s mobile platform beats out those from other social media networks, and mobile continues to grow fast. So, although Cuban may be right about the mistakes that Facebook seems to make repeatedly, there are far too many benefits that Facebook lends to give it up entirely. Plus, this new feature could very well fix the reach issues that brands are seeing with the company’s reach. So, I guess it’s a case of perfect timing.
