Should Ecommerce Sites Delete Old Facebook Posts?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis in Social Media
The other day, one of Brick Marketing’s ecommerce SEO clients had a really great question about their company Facebook page that I had never really considered before. As part of their social media marketing campaign, this client routinely posts sales and promotions to their Facebook page to let their consumers know what is going on (anniversary sales, clearance items, special promotions and so forth). It’s a great way to get some social signals for deep, internal product pages and drive social traffic over to their website. From an SEO perspective, this is a great tactic. However, my client brought up a good point that I thought needed to be share: should they remove old sales/promotions from their Facebook page in order to prevent confusion among their customers?
My client was worried that if they left old sales up for too long, customers would still think that promotion was going on. Even though all of the promotional posts outlined the expiration date of the coupon or sale, they didn’t want customers to have access to outdated information that might impact their shopping experience. They also thought that by removing the old sales posts they would be protecting their own interests, as customers couldn’t try to push an expired coupon through at checkout. They thought that people were much more likely to find and try to an older Facebook post to their advantage at checkout than keep track of a physical coupon.
Normally I would tell my clients you don’t want to delete old social updates (unless it was something that shouldn’t have gone live in the first place) because you’ll lose all the activity around that post (links, shares, Likes, etc). However, in this particular case business practice trumped traditional SEO and social media best practices. I had to admit that my client had a great point—removing those old Facebook posts was going eliminate any potential issues a customer might have while shopping. In this instance it made sense to sacrifice any SEO or social media benefits and delete expired sales and promotions from the company page.
I should mention that this client has other content going live on their Facebook page outside of promotional posts, so it’s not like their Facebook page would be barren once the posts were deleted. An empty social profile isn’t going to do you much good because your target audience needs some reason to hang out and interact with your company. Without content, your social profiles aren’t very social; they just become like any other static business listing.
Keep in mind that every business is different, even if you do work in the same industry. Just because this is what one ecommerce site is doing with their Facebook profile, it doesn’t automatically mean it’s the best course of action for your own social media marketing.
