Much like SEO (and technology in general!), social media websites are constantly changing and evolving. And in the ‘sink or swim’ world many small businesses live in, business marketers need to keep up and evolve as well. After all, what worked for businesses yesterday may not work today and what works today may not work tomorrow. As social media websites change and users evolve, businesses need to adapt their practices too in order to best utilize the platform.
As the ‘big daddy’ of social media platforms today, how marketers use Facebook is no exception. Facebook recently rolled out some pretty significant changes to it’s news feed and it has changed the way marketers are best using the social media platform to generate traffic to business websites.
Marketers have long recommended posting photographs as the best method for enticing user interaction and engaging users on Facebook. Photos on Facebook have long tended to get more reach, and more likes, comments and shares over standard text status updates and over links.
However, since Facebook rolled out with larger images – both within photograph and link post updates – the tide has changed a bit. No longer are the images within news feed link posts smaller than photo post updates. And, if done correctly, photographs contained within link posts on Facebook news feeds are the same size as images uploaded as standard photo posts.
But (and here’s the kicker), instead of having a short text link included within the photo description that users can click to go to a website (as is the case with a photo post), with a standard link post, the entire (large) photo and description are clickable links to the original source … to your website. And that’s a pretty big difference.
So, if your goal is to generate more traffic to your website from Facebook, be sure to include standard “link” post updates!
