Facebook is the marketing tool of choice for a series of small businesses – online or land based shops that usually used the social network to promote their special offers and sales. This will end starting next year, when Facebook will start filtering out unpaid promotional posts used by businesses as a marketing tool, The Wall Street Journal writes.
The new rules set to be rolled out by Facebook at the beginning of 2015 will no longer allow small businesses to reach out to their fans and followers using Facebook posts as unpaid advertising tools. According to the new rules, businesses that post unpaid marketing pitches or reuse content from their existing ads will be subject to a “significant decrease in distribution”, the WSJ reports. These changes will be the source of much grief and resentment on the part of small businesses – according to a recent report, more than 80% of them use Facebook as their primary marketing tool, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter.
According to Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president for small businesses, Facebook’s paid advertising options have recently become much more effective. The Facebook representative considers that businesses should stop using the social network as a niche social solution to build their reach or to make a post viral, but rather as a tool to help them grow their businesses. There are companies that consider this change to be a reduction of organic reach, and Levy claims to have a lot of empathy for them, but organic reach is just one of the benefits of having a Facebook presence, he says. Besides, he considers that paying for advertising through the social network will not be in vain.
This new change of rules will be another factor that will aggravate the already tense relationship between the social network and small businesses. They used to own their consumer relations through email and other marketing channels, but with Facebook this relationship gets similar to renting audience, but never to own it.