For years, one of the best tools in a social media marketer’s back pocket was the Facebook fangate. Facebook is soon discontinuing the fangate feature.
This tool allowed marketers to create contests, coupons or sweepstakes for Facebook business pages and required that customers enter these promotions by first “liking” the business’ Facebook page. It was a useful tool for incentivizing customers to become a fan of your Facebook page.
But as with all of the recent changes Facebook has been making for business pages, as of November 5th, marketers and business owners alike will have to find an alternative ways to increase Facebook fans.
In the ever changing social platform, it’s no surprise that Facebook think it has to eliminate fangates to force business pages to create valuable and meaningful content for Facebook fans.
Facebook wants the content on the page to be incentive enough for people to like a page. And at the same time, they also want to clear the way so that Facebook advertising is the only direct incentive to like the page.
It is a bit contradictory though since we’ve seen the changes Facebook has made to page reach over the past few months. The days of quality content going viral on its own are gone.
Now, to reach even a small portion of your followers, you have to boost your Facebook posts through advertising. It doesn’t matter the quality of your posts because in essence, you’ll have to pay Facebook to allow your posts to show up on your fans pages anyway.
It appears that the days when businesses had unlimited access to fans on Facebook are a thing of the past, but that may not be such a bad thing.
With the shifts in the Facebook dynamic, we’re seeing more businesses focus on “action-gating” rather than “like-gating” or incentivizing customers after they’ve provided email information, birthday or other relevant marketing information that can be used across many other platforms than just Facebook.
This change may allow marketers to provide clients with greater ROI for their efforts that can be used across many different marketing platforms, not just Facebook.
With just another change that Facebook is making to their social media platform, the tides are shifting yet again for social media marketers. What we can see is that a business’ social media future depends a lot more on the breadth than just the number of fans. It also leave the reality that more and more the only way to get many people to see your content is by advertising.
At this point, the most important thing for any businesses is to be actively involved on all social media platforms and consistently engage with the target audience. In doing so, not only will it bring a greater ROI for your business, but it will generate a truly engaged and interactive audience.