Thunderbolt Digital are experts when it comes to SEO, social media marketing and more! Something we know many small businesses struggle with is visibility, which can lead to less experienced page admins chasing after the idea of viral posts and social media campaigns. Some view ‘going viral’ as some sort of marketing holy grail, as even with a low conversion rate, the larger the audience exposed to the company, the more sales will be generated. However, with a new viral post surfacing almost every day, people are beginning to tire of them somewhat quickly, which is something that social media giant Facebook has picked up on.
In an ever-increasing effort to clear away the clutter in users’ news feeds, Facebook are implementing a rating system for viral posts, which can then become more or less visible based on these rankings. Whilst there are those who obviously love viral posts (for they wouldn’t achieve this status if people weren’t sharing them!), many users can find them uninteresting or even downright irritating, especially if the post in question is a useless copypasta.
So how exactly is Facebook going to implement this change? With a good old-fashioned survey; a series of comparison questions (which Facebook dub ‘story surveys’) are being rolled out to users for them to select the most interesting option out of a choice of two stories. If many people rank a viral post as uninteresting in these surveys, then the post in question will appear lower down in users’ news feeds.
Facebook claim that these changes shouldn’t cause any loss in traffic for publisher pages considering that viral posts are anomalies, but this is simply another reason for businesses not to pin their hopes on ‘going viral’ and focus instead on good marketing and effective SEO techniques.