Welcome to the Being Found Show. In this episode, we discuss news for local businesses, including the much talked about Google My Business, and Facebook changes.

First let’s talk about Google My Business. That’s that directory listing that shows up when you Google search a business and it shows the business information on the right side of the screen. Its called a knowledge graph. “Google My Business” listing are being seen more than your business websites. It’s very important to be apart of Google My Business.

They’ve now come out with the ability for businesses to share a video on their Google My Business listing. So essentially you can log into your account, and can upload a quick 30-second video of tutorials, showing off the location, or of videos of your products. Think about this; every time someone Googles something and you show up in that directory, Google is saying “Hey we’re going to make this video available” because Google knows their users want to see your video. So this is something to take advantage of and this just came out.

Go to your Google My Business listing, if you don’t know if you have one, Google most likely Google has you showing up as a listing even if you didn’t claim it. Google has control over your business information, you want to control your own!

Facebook is changing what you will be seeing and its affecting business pages the most.

Regular old people who are using Facebook are accepting and grateful. For businesses, this is a big deal if you’re using Facebook for your marketing and for communicating with your fans or just getting general awareness. The world has changed for you.

Chauncey: Zuckerberg came out, and he said that they are going to show less ads, fewer articles, and less information from business pages and he expects that people will use Facebook less throughout the day. This click bait is involving people to the point where they’re on there more than they should be. A previous high ranking employee was also all over the news and had come out against Facebook saying that they were developing a purposefully addictive product. That’s another thing that he’s trying to address with this change.

Joe: Essentially what Zuckerberg has done is he’s told his team that he wants to encourage more discussion and so what he’s doing is he’s moving away from promoting media, newspapers and famous people and brands. But here’s the thing, he has made this directive where we’re seeing the changes first as the news feed. He says that’s just the beginning. It’s already almost impossible to create something shared on Facebook to be seen by your whole audience because of algorithms.

According to Facebook: “Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”

This means that have been creating engaging content and sparking conversations with your followers, then you’re in a great place. You may still see a minor drop in your organic reach, but your Facebook strategy won’t be drastically affected by this change.

Chauncey: I was just talking to a client this week that said well I want to run something and I want to boost the post to get people to like it and share it and all that kind of stuff. What Zuckerberg is saying here is he’s going away from measuring whether a post matters or not based on if you get likes and shares and all that kind of stuff.

Do you think that he’s doing this because this is another case of a billionaire who got older and decided he’s going to make the world better? Or do you think this is a social shift and he’s at the head of it?

Joe: Zuckerberg does control his company. He is one of the first companies to go public where he maintains control. The board and stockholders have little power, and he does what he wants. What this change has done is made it even harder for something you create to show up in a news feed and especially as click bait. He is aiming to reduce engagement and increase discussion.

Thank you for listening to this segment of the Being Found Show, to hear the full show listen here:  Being Found Show Episode#44  or subscribe to our podcast.