Change is good, right?

At least every week, I tell several entrepreneurs NOT to build their businesses on someone else’s platform. While FB is so easy to use, you must remember one important fact. YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. Your activity, interests and data is what FB sells to advertisers.

So like any other good product development team, they are going to make changes, take away features and do things in the name of “social responsibility” to limit their liability and make your experience/access more limiting. Sorry to be negative, it’s the facts. We have no one to blame but ourselves. Our society has weaponized social media and FB is getting heat for it. If this was a car manufacture and people were getting hurt because they weren’t using common sense (like closing the car door when they pull away), a “stop” feature would be implemented to prevent people from hurting themselves.

And so FB will be saving us from ourselves.

This could impact your business, we’ll talk about some of this during the challenge.   For now, below is a summary of changes coming and some ways we can use this as an opportunity to sharpen our saws and get uncomfortable! After all, no one grows in the comfort zone.

Let’s Get The Ugly Stuff Out Of The Way First

1.  FB will be moving away from a “digital townsquare to more like a “digital living room.”  More privacy focused. Things will be more personal (which is good). Eventually, your post will only be shown to those who have opted in to see it  or your ad will only be shown to people who have agreed that they are ok with your ads in their feed. Good news for big brands like NIke but not so good for us smaller folks who rely on exposure through organic reach. Do you know what this means? We have to really, really connect with our audiences.  It will be your job to understand what they want, when they want it and how they want it in terms of content and offers. Nothing bad about knowing who your customer is!

2.  Your content will not be around forever anymore. They call it Reducing Permanence. This way, people can share stupid stuff that won’t hurt them later. Hey, this could be a great thing for those of us who may be embarrassed by that all night college party 10 years ago. Another “stop” feature to prevent people from hurting themselves.

3.  Security is another focus. This is really good news. I hope they get their arms around fake accounts, impersonations and hackers. Don’t use FB to pay for stuff or store sensitive data. I know it’s easy and who doesn’t love Venmo, but the hacked accounts are at record highs.

A few other changes coming, you can read them all here– This was a post from Zuckerberg in March. However, things are starting to really happen now.

Facebook and IG Changes Have Been Happening- Little by Little

 If you haven’t noticed or you don’t run ads, the restrictions put on ad copy has been suffocating. We are no longer to say the word “you’re in the lead sentence or pose a question. With all the changes come all the glitches. There are reports of thousands of people losing access to their FB accounts, ad accounts and business pages for weeks and months at a time.

For the average user, things haven’t been so good either. Thousands of people are locked out of their accounts and stuck in a crazy verification loop. It’s just a bug, but for avid FB users who spend much of their workday on the platform, it’s a freaking crisis!  Twitter really reaps the rewards of a FB outage or glitch because when people get locked out, they flock to Twitter to find out what is going on.

It’s a tough time for  FB as they figure out how not to get sued or subpoenaed to congress.

There’s nothing we can do about any of it to make it go away, so when in Rome, well you know! 

Here’s How You Can Adapt

 Instagram is going to get a free pass this year with major overhauls. So NOW is the time to up that IG game. You have an entire year to gain some traction before the changes roll out all over the globe.

Diversify. Try other platforms like Tik Tok, LinkedIn Pinterest. You’d be surprised how fun it is to puddle jump across platforms!

Take this opportunity to really get to know your audience. Take some polls and put a little money behind them to get the answers you need to make some shifts in your strategy to personalize the experience with you and your company.

Focus on community building rather than announcements, funny memes and inspirational quotes. Find ways to make deeper connections with folks on FB and IG.

Don’t stress, change is good just not always comfortable. This can force us to try something different, learn something new and build more meaningful relationships.