A few weeks ago, Facebook introduced to their audience a new updated page experience. With the new design layout and simplified navigation, Facebook decided to get rid of its well-known like button from its redesigned public pages.
What are the reasons for this change? And what potential impact this update can have on your marketing KPIs?
As many marketers count their social media followers on a regular basis to get an understanding of their “organic social media” reach – this has an impact on quite some reports, statistics and KPIs.
Let us dig deeper into this topic!
Structure of the article:
- Recent Facebook page update: what changed?
- Focus on page followers over likes: what are the main reasons?
- Facebook page update: What is the key impact on your marketing KPIs?
Recent Facebook update: What changed?
In the next coming days & weeks, Facebook will activate a new version of the “Facebook Pages,” which will bring next to various graphical updates, some changes in what Facebook page related metrics are measured and how.
To better understand what has changed, let us recap the page design before the update.
In general, there were three ways of how a user could interact with your page:
- Like
- Like and Follow
- Follow
Basically, by introducing a new design, Facebook focuses only on the third option, “Follow.”
Hence, from now Facebook users can only choose to “follow” your page. Options “Like” and “Like and Follow” will be removed from your Facebook page completely.
Focus on page followers over likes: what are the main reasons?
So what exactly is the main reason behind this change?
According to Facebook, the main goal of removing likes “to simplify the way people connect with their favorite Pages”.
“Unlike Likes, Followers of a Page represent the people who can receive updates from Pages, which helps give public figures a stronger indication of their fan base.” – stated in the announcement.
Therefore, by decreasing the number of interaction options, Facebook aims to make it easier for companies to track their actual fan base or engaged audience. From now on the company’s fan base will strongly depend on how many Facebook users actually started to follow the page.
Therefore, we can conclude that this Facebook update will allow companies to focus on their engaged audience – followers.
Facebook update: what is the key impact in regards to marketing KPIs
Important to understand that by removing one of the key interaction KPIs, Facebook will force marketers to adjust their strategies.
Key changes:
- Followers is a new Metric (similar to Instagram, Twitter, and others)
- Page Fans & Page likes will be replaced with followers
Important to understand the following consequences:
- Existing “Follows” will automatically become “Followers” (see the number of follows on your Facebook page)
- If someone liked your page but didn’t follow, this person will not be converted to a follower.
As a result, keep in mind that your KPIs which you tracked so far, might significantly change in the upcoming months, and you should be ready to shift your focus from counting likes and page fans to page followers.
On the technical side: Facebook has not announced yet, how these new metrics “followers” will be read over their technical interface (API). As soon as we see any update there, we’ll keep you posted obviously. Currently, we assume the existing field “follows” will be reused for this purpose.
We hope this article will help you to prepare for the upcoming change!
Stay tuned. Find out what are the Seven key tactics for increasing your conversion rate.
Find more information about the Facebook update here: Facebook on the new Page, Facebook Help.
