How The Coming Facebook Changes Could Affect Your Jewelry Business

by Charles Pobee-Mensah, Director of Digital Marketing On January 11, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said: “I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” In order to achieve this goal, here are some changes that Facebook is planning and expecting to take place:

Family First: They plan to prioritize friends and family over brands and businesses
Deeper Connections: Facebook will encourage conversations over “passive experiences”
Less Engagement: Facebook basically said that it is willing to sacrifice user time and engagement spent on Facebook in order to make it a better place

As laudable as this all is, this list might look scary if you’re a small business. Let’s take a look at what you can expect.

Here’s How Your Jewelry Business Could Be Affected

Expect More Competition

On Facebook, you’re not just competing with other jewelers for ad space. You’re up against anyone who markets to the same demographics. Right now, businesses who have a knack for viral content can still get their message out on Facebook organically. These changes probably mean that time’s up for them. When they start advertising on Facebook to make up for the lost engagement, competition for eyeballs will go up. And you know what that means...

Expect More Expensive Ads

Facebook said that they expect people to spend less time on their platform and for some metrics of engagement to go down. That leaves more advertisers fighting over fewer opportunities. As the rule of supply and demand goes, expect the cost of advertising on Facebook to go up.

Expect Facebook Ads to Be More Effective Than Ever Before

Facebook also said that they want the time spent on their platform to be more meaningful. That means that the people who interact with your ads could be doing so with more attention and intent than ever before. It would be to easy look at higher prices and lower engagement and assume that your Facebook ads are simply performing worse. In this situation, however, the value of your ads may have increased more dramatically than the cost.

Tracking Facebook’s Effectiveness

Though it can be difficult to prove the effectiveness of Facebook ads, there are some things that jewelers can do to know that the platform is working. Our Facebook strategy for our clients is brand awareness. We use the platform to get the word out about our clients and to help keep them top of mind. However, this year we are also using Facebook as an opportunity to generate bridal and custom jewelry leads. Strategies like social retargeting allow us to do more tracking in these areas and better understand the potential of Facebook advertising.

A Reminder Of How You Should Balance Your Marketing

We still don’t know how dramatically these changes will affect things. Perhaps it’s small. Perhaps not. Regardless, this is a perfect reminder of how you should balance your marketing efforts. Author Michael Hyatt talks about social media platforms as “embassies”. You may have a consistent presence there, but it is not a place you control. It is important to balance that with strong marketing tools that you own. Namely your email list and your website. When strong, these powerful tools help to curb Facebook uncertainty. And with a good agency on your side, you can ride the upside of these changes.Are you looking for an agency that knows how to properly run a Facebook campaign in the jewelry market? Contact suits@fruchtman.com.