The New Facebook Feature Impacting Your Business Page Engagement

What’s happening?

Facebook has announced they will soon roll out an activity dashboard to track the time a user spends on each platform. Users will be able to set reminders to let them know it’s time to log off, as well as mute notifications from the app.  

While this may be good news for the user who winds up spending 3 hours browsing instead of their intended 10 minutes, it’s not so great for you. As a result, your Facebook business page could experience less engagement on posts, and you may be required to make some smart shifts to your online strategy to capture (and re-capture) your audience.

Facebook and Instagram are not alone in this. Similar moves are being introduced by Apple and Google in a bid to encourage ‘healthier’ social media use among younger generations, who are becoming addicted to the dopamine hit of a Facebook ‘like’.

What’s the connection between social media and mental health?

A study at UC San Diego and Yale showed that people who are serial clickers (that is, click on links 4 times more than average, and/or who like twice the number of posts) reported “worse mental health than average”. On the upside, the same study showed that interacting with friends on Facebook is linked to improvements in well-being.

How do I protect my business page?

User behaviour can be impacted by a number of things. But mainly, if you know your audience, you will already know how to engage them without too much concern. When it comes to Facebook’s new dashboard, whether your page is affected will rest on who your audience is: their demographics, their interests, and their life stage.

If you’re worried, we suggest you monitor your audience engagement on your Facebook and Instagram pages weekly. Identify times where you receive less engagement (likes, comments and shares) and adjust your posts accordingly to maximise engagement potential. It’s a game of trial and error, but you will learn a lot about the people interacting with your business—and that’s pretty priceless!

Need a hand managing your social? Give us a call on 1300 015 590 today and we’ll get you sorted.