I’ve been telling my clients for years, “Don’t get too comfortable with your Social Media marketing, it’s going to change tomorrow.”  You may have noticed Facebook’s recent plethora of changes.  They’ve changed the newsfeed (again), added a timeline (questionable usefulness), and they’re reducing the value of the Like button.  Wait… what was that???

That’s right.  The ubiquitous Like button, which has become so much a part of our online lives, is evolving into more of a voting mechanism.  In my opinion, this is great news.

So what does this mean to you?  You’ve spent countless hours and maybe thousands of dollars, increasing your “Likers” on your Facebook business page.  It always seemed almost ridiculous to me, that we as marketers should be practically driven into a frenzy of getting people to “follow” our brand.  90% of our messages get ignored anyway.  This is why small business marketers say their Facebook page doesn’t work for them.  At least not in the sense that it gets them any business.

Users will now have a way to “vote” on content.  To me this makes a whole helluva lot more sense.  It means the boring, all-about-me promotional content that we see so much of can now get voted down into oblivion, while the interesting cool stuff will get promoted to the top.

This is one Facebook change I can hang my hat on.  From both a consumer’s side and a marketer’s side.  From a consumer’s side I will no longer have to tolerate crap on my Fb feed.  From a marketer’s side I will have a lot less competition, and my truly authentic and valuable message will clearly shine amongst the drivel.

Not that I think for a moment that the spammers won’t come up with some way of getting around it.  Like hiring legions of $2/hr off-shore teenagers to Vote Up the crap content they post for their clients.   Black hat will always exist, but somehow the brains behind the beasts (Google, Facebook, etc.) will continue to find ways to combat it.  Good for them.  And for us.

I invite you to read Mashable’s blog post, which was my source for this post, at: http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/facebooks-changes-marketers

Listen to this 1-1/2 minute audio clip taken from a recent E-Marketing Workshop I held.  In it I explain how to make sure you are getting the results you desire from your Facebook Business Page.

Listen to the “Facebook ROI Audio Clip” by clicking here.

A colleague of mine recently wrote an article for her newsletter on the topic of list size.  Many business owners who rely on email marketing for sales leads constantly stress over the challenge of growing our lists.

I had to chuckle when I saw her article because 6 months ago she was lamenting to me that her list wasn’t nearly as big as those of other, well-known people in her field.  At the time I said to her, “It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.  The size of your list is not as important as the number of people who see real value in what you provide.”  Clearly she got the message.  Whether it was from me, or if I just planted a seed and she took it from there, I was happy to see she changed her mind and doesn’t worry so much about comparative list sizes any more.  By the way, her list is way bigger than mine .

Many of the “big names” in the industry have tens of thousands of people on their list.  While this sounds great, you have to wonder what percentage of those people actually pay any attention to the messages that get sent to them from the provider.  How many mailing lists are YOU on?  How many of those messages do you actually read?  Maybe it’s time to start unsubscribing… liberally.

The size issue is the same deal with Twitter followers and Facebook Business Page Likers.  You can use a site like fiverr.com to hire someone cheaply to get followers or likers for you, but are these followers really paying any attention to your messages?  I think it’s more about ego and bragging rights than about really connecting with your audience.

If you are one of these people who think more is automatically better… my advice to you is “get over yourself.”  Provide real value to people and they will join your list.  It’s that simple.

My friend who wrote the article made the suggestion to me that the bigger your list, the more your quality degrades.  I’m not sure I agree with that completely, but it gave me something to think about.  I had not ever considered that point, and plan on doing some research to find out what others think about it.  If you have any thoughts about this I’d love to hear them, please comment below.

Lisa