Facebook Takes More Memorial Page Market Share with Additional Updates
More changes have come to Facebook’s digital memorialization pages making them more advanced, more effective, and even more likely to be the digital memorial service that’s most used by people in the future.
In our last post, ‘Facebook’s new tribute section’, we talked about the ‘Tribute’ section that Facebook had begun adding to profiles when a user dies. Using this new feature, people can write notes about their lost friends and loved ones directly on the memorialized page.
This is reducing the market for funeral home-hosted memorial pages, and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does reduce the exposure that funeral homes are receiving online. Funeral Homes are now starting to increase their focus on Facebook so that they can maintain exposure and continue to attract new clients.
With additional changes this month, Facebook has now made itself an even more dominant player in the digital memorialization world with ‘legacy contacts’. You can now set who becomes your legacy contact and when Facebook is informed of the death of someone the legacy contact will become in control of the account.
The legacy contact will be able to act as a moderator of the account and have the ability to delete comments, remove tags and block accounts from posting or viewing the tribute section. This is a great feature because it allows legacy contacts to help protect others from seeing content that might upset them.
Another update is aimed at younger users’ accounts. In the past, if you were under 18 you couldn’t have a legacy contact, and if you didn’t have one set before you died then your account was permanently locked. This meant that younger users’ accounts couldn’t have moderators, but fortunately, they have now updated it so that parents can request to be a legacy contact to a child’s page after their child passes away.
Finally, Facebook has updated their AI so that people don’t get notifications from deceased accounts. The notifications get blocked as soon as Facebook finds out that someone has died, and stops showing notifications before the account has even been changed to a memorialization page. All these updates are great for users because they reduce any unintended trauma and put more control into the hands of people that are going to be most affected by the page.
It does, however, mean that the exposure funeral homes used to receive from digital memorialization is likely to continue to decrease, as Facebook memorialization pages become more widely used and begin to dominate the market.
Now is the time for funeral homes to shift to digital marketing strategies. People are still going to need memorialization services just as much as before, but finding out that you provide those services is beginning to get more challenging. If you want to learn more about Facebook’s digital memorialization pages, see our previous article here.
Want to learn how shifting to Facebook marketing can help you gain market share, increase call volume, and grow revenue? Click to schedule a free demo with DISRUPT Media today.
Article by Connecting Directors contributor Charles Latham
