You know how Facebook wants to answer the question, “Why would anyone leave their Facebook page?” The platform opened up purchases, facilitated video chat in instant messaging and branched into internal office communications. In 2015, Facebook moved the video marketing mountain, tested new reaction emotions to supercharge the ‘Like’ button and started indexing two billion posts.
Sherry Heyl, a partner in Sensei Project, an Atlanta-based social media agency, included this Facebook summary in her year end post, “The Evolution of Social Media in 2015.”
How Facebook Evolved in 2015
“The year started with algorithm changes that drastically decreased the reach of promotional type posts. Although this impacted all businesses, we focused on how nonprofits and small businesses could adapt.
To ensure a more credible business experience, Facebook also started removing fake profiles that were created by what I will call “Like” farms. Many business saw a drop in Likes on their page which caused some concern, but as we advised to clients, it was good thing that helped increase valuable engagement with real people.
In March, Facebook ripped the inbox out of the mobile app to create the Facebook Messenger App. As we predicted, Messenger is evolving to be it’s own stand alone valuable platfom.
There was an F8 event this year, which is a big deal because Facebook does not host an F8 every year. This is the conference where Facebook let’s everyone knows their goals and ambitions. This year we heard about video, messenger, and virtual reality.
In April we saw how serious Facebook was about video as they crashed YouTube’s 10th birthday with news of their compelling changes to the video platform. We also saw the launch of video chat within the Messenger Platform.
It did not take long for Facebook to declare that they had taken control of the video marketing mountain. In May it was announced that brands were moving the video content to Facebook. YouTube said, but…but…people want to see how-to videos on the YouTube platform.
In July , Facebook began testing the ability to allow people to make purchases straight from business pages, because why would anyone want to leave Facebook.
In August Facebook began courting nonprofits more, by launchin a donate now call-to-action whichcontinues to evolve.
Facebook is making moves on Twitter’s breaking news territory with Signals, and in the same week broke some news of its own that we may soon have more ways to respond to a post. It seems they are taking a variety of emotions into consideration.
Then Facebook did some hijacking of news, Star Wars news and hype to be exact, by using a Star Wars video to showcase their 360 video capability.
In October Facebook started making moves in the search world by announcing they are going to index the 2 Trillion posts so that they can easily be found (if they are public).
And since everyone is already on Facebook, why not use Facebook to connect and collaborate at work?”
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