How You Should Pepare For Facebook Ruling The World
April 19, 2016
Each week, in our Sync2CRM User Group, I spend a few minutes on what is new and meaningful to my clients. (April 21, 2016), I expressed my view, reinforced in a big way by what I saw and heard from the F8 conference last week (Facebook’s annual conference for developers), that Facebook is going to rule the world very, very soon.
That is not a joke …
For small business owners, it is both a threat and opportunity of epic magnitude.
In times of rapid transition, like this one, businesses who fail to look ahead … will fail – in the blink of an eye. And wonder what happpened!
Others, who through luck or planning step in front of the wave, will make tons of money faster than they ever thought possible.
No sooner had the user group ended (April 21, 2016) than I opened my Google alerts to find this article in the New York Times: Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic.
While it is discussing the tectonic shifts happening in the online publishing industry, these are the exact trends we were discussing in the user group. Small business owners need to take heed. The implications have ramifications for everyone.
“But now, there is a realization that something more profound has happened: The transition from an Internet of websites to an Internet of mobile apps and social platforms, and Facebook in particular, is no longer coming — it is here.”
What is driving this profound shift is mobile. The website is going away. If you watch Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote from last week (and you should), he laid out their 10 year roadmap. To me, it seems that Facebook becoming the central hub of business is inevitable and will happen in the blink of an eye.
“As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary detours, leading to the weakened traffic numbers for news sites.”
The online publishers are the canary in the coal mine. What is happening to them will happen to all of us.
This is immensely exciting for small businesses. We can see what is happening. We are nimble. There is an opportunity to adjust. Not so much for online publishers.
“Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.”
One word … staggering!
“At the same time, publishers pored over a report from the analytics firm Parse.ly, detailing how important Facebook had become to their business: Among sites tracked by the firm, more than 40 percent of web traffic came from the social network.”
So … what do we do? How do we capitalize?
One thing is for certain … we don’t sit on our hands or put our head in the sand!
“Mr. Malik of Gigaom, whose site employed 85 people at its peak, said if he were to start the business today, it would probably be a Facebook page. There is an opportunity, clearly, to reach people there.”
While the idea that we may have no choice but to transact business primarily through Facebook is disconcerting, to say the least … can you say eggs in one basket and lack of control? … it is a reality. It will be interesting to come back to this post in a year and see how much has changed.
As I said in a blog post (April 21, 2016), I have been slow to grasp the implications of mobile. But now that I have, I’m on it.
These are some of the changes to my business I will be making and/or testing in the coming months. Some are big. Some are small. I am sure there will be many more as the coming months unfold …
- Going to F8 next year, in person, come hell or high water
- Heavier emphasis on Facebook Lead Ads for Sync2CRM
- Heavier emphasis on Lead Ads for my own business advertising
- Publishing all blog posts, in their entirety, on Facebook page – not just as a link (like this)
- New Rule – if it exists elsewhere, it better be on my Facebook page – that includes pages, offers, order forms, opt-ins, etc.
- Making full use of Canvas, Business Videos, Context Cards and any other tools Facebook puts out there
- Thinking of Facebook fans as the third list – 1) pixeled audiences, 2) email, and now 3) Facebook Fans, which I had never paid attention to before
- Publishing Instant Articles
- Mobile optimizing EVERYTHING
- Video, video, video – including using the new Facebook LIVE
- Using Facebook Messenger for customer support
- Offering limited business mentoring to those needing help with all this
These are my initial thoughts. They can’t all happen at once, obviously. But watch … you will see them happening.
Now Over To You …
What will you do? I’ll be interested to know. Leave your thoughts, ideas and comments below.
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