Facebook has announced a few new features designed to support local businesses. Their full post is here, but there was one thing that stood out as noteworthy: the use of organic posts in the Businesses Nearby feature.
Transcript
G’day! Facebook announced a couple of new features they’re beginning to roll out, designed to help local businesses. They made that announcement on the 12th of May, so only a couple of days ago. Now. Let’s jump in and have a quick look at those now.
My name’s Jason Foss. Let’s have a look at those Facebook features that they’ve just announced. The 1st one here is the introduction of some some “support small business” stickers that you can use in your stories on both Facebook and Instagram.
But the interesting one is down here to this “Businesses Nearby” section. You’ll see here that in this example somebody’s looked within two miles of San Francisco, and they haven’t seen local business pages show up, but posts from local businesses.
Now that’s an interesting turn of events. Considering that Facebook, for the longest time, has been, well, discriminating against organic posts, they want you to boost posts in order to show them to more people. And so, therefore, a lot of the effort that you’ve traditionally put into organic posts doesn’t get seen by as many people as you would hope unless you put your hand your pocket and give Facebook some money.
But with this change here, instead of featuring just local business pages, they’re featuring these – by looks of it – organic posts from local businesses.
This hasn’t rolled out in Australia. I don’t have it on my phone just yet, but keep an eye out for it as it does roll out. The organic, the regular posts that you do to your local business Facebook page may well start to show up on screens like this, so keep your eyes peeled for that one. Be interesting to see how that comes out.
My name’s Jason Foss. Thanks for watching.