Facebook bans Like Gating; so what now?

Facebook recently announced that it had put the brakes on incentivised liking by banning brands from “Like Gating” their Facebook pages. According to Facebook software engineer Harshdeep Singh, the move is designed to ensure that Facebook users “like pages because they want to connect and hear from the businesses, not because of artificial incentives”.

For anyone who’s been paying attention to Facebook’s recent moves to try and guarantee that it remains as relevant as possible by being as useful to its users as possible, this shouldn’t be a surprising move. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that the social network’s goal for the newsfeed is “…trying to personalise it and show you the stuff that’s going to be most interesting to you.”

The odds of people being genuinely interested in the content from brands that are incentivising them to like their pages are  pretty slim.

According to Facebook, its users are exposed to more than 1 500 newsfeed stories a day, but the average user will only see 100 stories in the newsfeed and Facebook is constantly trying to learn what kind of content users are most interested in.

This means that Facebook will continue to try to deliver the most useful content to their users in their newsfeeds. In the context of this effort, it makes sense that Facebook would put the onus on brands to engage with fans in a more honest and authentic way with a focus on truly useful content, rather than using the promise of winning a prize as a way of attracting new fans.

The thing that makes social media such a potentially powerful channel for brands is also the most challenging. Social media allows brands to develop and cultivate real authentic relationships their customers on a scale that’s never been seen before. However the challenge is that it also requires brands to think in a manner that is organic in order to drive engagement, which is largely counter intuitive for brands that have grown used to broadcasting messages to a distant audience that can’t talk back.

And, unfortunately, that’s largely how some brands have approached social media – using it as a broadcast medium with like-gates utilised to lure Facebook users into liking their pages with the promise of prizes or various other forms of incentives.

If brands hope to be successful on social media, they need to make a significant shift in their approach and work to earn likes naturally by publishing truly intriguing, useful content and then amplifying the posts that gain traction using paid media in order to increase reach.

Marko Muellner, the digital vice president and group director at the world’s largest public relations firm Edelman, was quoted as saying, “The end of like-gate isn’t surprising, nor should marketers be upset. Facebook is the world’s most targeted mobile advertising platform first, and a great place to gain earned lift second.”

In other words, use Facebook’s comprehensive targeting options to ensure that you are targeting your message to the most relevant audience from the very beginning and then implement an organic, well-planned content strategy and periodic paid media to deliver useful content that your audience will find useful and share with their own connections. The odds are that Facebook will continue to make changes to the platform that put the user at the center of their thinking.

The challenge for brands will be to similarly keep their fans at the center of their content strategies in order to effectively adapt to any future changes. What are your thoughts on the announced change? Is it all bad, all good or somewhere ambiguously in the middle? Let’s dish!