As you are engaging in the major social media outlets, mainly through Facebook, and trying to provide high quality and insightful content for your targeted audience, you may start noticing that your impressions, slowly but surely, seem to be on a decline. You're answering questions, expanding your reach and trying to keep your audience engaged with your posts. Still, with all this work, you aren't making the same impact as before.
Are you using any Facebook applications to release your content? As we know, everyone is releasing new or improved applications daily. Facebook's release last year included "threaded comments" as a new way to receive and share content that's relevant to you. If you and a friend post the same content, it now appears as a single post, with your post as a follow-up, essentially turning the two posts into one.
This update was quickly capitalized by Farmville, Happy Aquarium and many of the other Facebook games and applications. At the time, these apps were requiring players to keep adding more friends, and their involvement, to advance through the games. The games were programmed so that when a player allowed the application to post on her wall, it caused users who weren't playing to be slammed with unwanted content.
Facebook responded to the ensuing complaints and enabled the threaded content into the apps. This was a godsend for people who don't like seeing all the requests and postings from games they have no desire to be involved in (myself included), but a disaster for the players.
Companies noticed the problem and began to capitalize on it. One in particular, Buddy Media, released its own software for social media clients. This software allowed clients to give their target audience meaningful content without having to learn all of Facebook's applications and procedures. Companies such as Target, ABC and others began using the software to increase their fan base but they, too, were subject to the same threaded content feature.
The posts that rolled out after the "threaded content clause", as we'll call it, were grouped in the news feed and users were given the option to see more. This was Facebook's method to prevent users from seeing posts that they might deem as spam.
But, when all the companies such as Buddy Media began to have to follow the threaded content clause, it ended up hurting their clients' visibility. When you expand a post from a certain app, you can see that posts from different brands are lumped together. The information isn't necessarily related to any of the other brands, and the threaded-content update prevents it from being seen.
This brings us to some key questions. Do threaded content posts still amount to an impression within your Facebook community? Could a new content application bring new impressions and new ways to reach your audience? Most Facebook users now use the mobile application, or other platforms such as Motorola Blur, to access the site and news feeds. Are these apps affected by the threaded content clause?
Advertising and brand management on Facebook can only be effective if the messages are visible to their targeted audiences. Keep this in mind when you are searching for applications that you think may increase your impressions. There are ways to boost your presence on social media platforms; just be wary of anyone offering up an easy fix. Instead, seek out knowledgeable professionals.
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