How Facebook News Ban Negatively Impacts Your Business

You may have heard Australia was recently temporarily disconnected from accessing all news links and news pages on Facebook.  Also many Australian pages had ‘no content’ visible for most people around the world.

If you missed what happened, here’s an outline of the Facebook news ban and why it happened.

Regardless of which side of the “news corps vs Facebook” and “news corps vs Google” debate you sit on, one thing is for sure – the future of Facebook and other social media platforms is uncertain more than ever.

You may remember a while ago, MySpace was the place to be – then virtually overnight everyone switched to Facebook.

Two years ago Google Plus shut its doors due to “low usage” despite the fact that 180 million people were using it.

So whilst social networks are excellent tools, there are many things that can go wrong:

• they can shut down
• they can be shut down due to new government regulations and laws
• customers can quickly switch to other platforms
• users can be locked out of their accounts due to often innocent breaches of terms and conditions
• user accounts can be shut down temporarily or permanently when their accounts have been hacked
• social page / profile / posts’  visibility can be affected by changes to algorithms

So if your business relies on social media, whether it is for keeping in touch with customers or driving traffic to your business, it is important you set up  your business so that you are in control of your online presence.

This can mean:

• updating your website to ensure it reflects your business as it is today
• putting all your social media posts on your blog / website
• regularly emailing your customers instead of only communicating via social networks
• selling products via your website, not social networks
• ensuring customers can contact you or book appointments with you easily

Check out the 27 reasons your website should be the centre of your business universe.

If you have any concerns about your online presence, book a website strategy session with me and we can go over where your business is right now and any tweaks that you may need to do to make sure your business is protected long term.