Facebook Pay To Play: What To Do – Small Business Oregon

For business owners Facebook is becoming more and more a “pay-to-play” model. You’ve put time and money into building your business pages ‘likes’, creating relationships, content creation and curation, So what do you do?

facebook business (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

On the one hand, businesses have never before had a free media platform through which to build our brand and communicate to current customers, so this was bound to happen. But on the other hand, though big businesses may be able to swallow the new pay-to-play rules, it’s challenging for small businesses that don’t think they can afford to advertise.

Prior to changing the algorithm Facebook had created a platform that allowed small business to close the gap with the big boxes. The cost was much less to compete with big boxes talking to consumers on Facebook  than radio, television or print.

Here are some simple takeaways for small business owners wondering what their next step should be:

Experiment with Facebook ads. While Facebook did take away our FREE reach, they did give us some new tools to target your reach. With Facebook ads you can now target them for likes, page post engagement, website hits, website conversions, event responses and more. You can target, gender, age, location and interests. Set your budget and target audience and give it a try.

Experiment with other social-media platforms. Is your business on Twitter? LinkedIn? Instagram? How about YouTube, SlideShare, Pinterest? While they don’t have the market share that Facebook has they all have their niche that attracts consumers, find the social media platform whose niche best works with your business category and give it a try.

Create Entertaining, Educating and Contest Content. Instead of paying Facebook for ads, invest in awesome original content. Create content within your brand/image that is going to make people want to ‘like,’ ‘share,’ ‘comment’. Work with contest apps and do even more to get your page even more involved with what you’re posting.

What not to do. Don’t panic. Facebook is still an incredible direct marketing tool and it is more cost effective than a lot of your alternatives.

If you’re looking for help on how to market your business page, have questions on Facebook ads, how much, and how often? What social media platform suits your business best? Contact Paradux Media for a free consultation.