Facebook Marketing: Organic Views End

Since businesses started using Facebook, it has become a valuable interface for them to supplement their ongoing marketing strategies. After Facebook opened their service to the masses in September of 2006, it wasn't difficult for popular local business posts to be front and center on the news feeds of people who had "liked" their business page. Because of this, many marketing professionals started putting together strategies centered around flooding their company pages with information to increase organizational visibility.

After a while, Facebook realized that businesses were taking advantage of the free advertising Facebook offered and flooding newsfeeds with information. In order to combat the surplus of posts, Facebook changed their delivery algorithm. As a result, businesses that had been getting results by diligently posting statuses for years, noticed that their status updates are being seen by fewer and fewer people. This change has substantially decreased the organic reach of their posts.

What is Organic Reach?

There are several factors that determine whether your posts will show up on the news feed. Your reach will fluctuate depending on the content of your posts and the amount of shares/likes that your posts receive. Organic reach is the concept where a Facebook user's posts are delivered to the people that they share a relationship with; or more accurately, their target audience. Traditionally (and as recently as October), a small business could trust that their posts would reach about 15% of the news feeds of the user base they are targeting. While this number doesn't seem like much, it's about double the number of post views business get organically today. The current average is about 6.5%, however, some studies suggest that it is as low as 1%. It is possible for an individual user to opt to see all of the posts by a certain business but this has to be done on an individual basis. There is more information about this topic further along in the article.

The "Facebook official" reason for this decline is that viewers are looking for quality content. This policy would give prestige to a popular piece of content compared to an irregular piece of content. That seems logical enough, but it's not hard to see the ulterior motive at work. By making businesses and organizations pay to distribute their marketing materials, it provides additional revenue for Facebook. Expect this trend to continue. Businesses that want more of their targeted audience to see their posts will inevitably have to advertise on Facebook.

What Can I Do to Reach More People?

To expand your reach, there are some fee-based solutions that Facebook now provides businesses so that they have additional avenues in which to get their message out to more people.

As their core revenue creator, Facebook provides multiple ways to improve your organization's visibility. One way they do this is by allowing companies to boost a specific post. A post that has been boosted increases the likelihood that people will see your message in their news feed. A business must have 100 likes or more before they are able to boost a post. Boosting a post has a $1.00 per day minimum. The amount of money spent on boosting your posts will increase the amount of people (and likely the percentage of your target audience) who will see your post. Utilizing the monetary boost for your Facebook posts provides businesses to choose whether they would like their posts to be presented to 'People who like your Page and their friends' or 'People you choose through targeting.' Aside from this, users are also given the ability to choose the duration of time, by day, that they'd like your post to be boosted for.

By taking advantage of Facebook Advertising, you will likely be able to overcome the handicap that your organic posts are currently experiencing. The Facebook Ads program is different from traditional post-boosting since the advertising spaces are not based on a post; they are dedicated advertisements. You have substantially enhanced design capabilities as well as several end results for your advertising choices. These include:

• Page Post Engagement
• Page Likes
• Clicks to Website
• Website Conversions
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• Event Responses
• Offer Claims

Each of these ad types have a dedicated Ad Manager that provides users with an interface to design the ads. This customization gives marketers solid options to reach their target audience and desired result.

Are There Any Alternatives to Fee-Based Promotions?

If you haven't decided on a budget for your company's Facebook advertising, or don't have one, you can do a little grassroots marketing and continuously remind the people who have liked your page that they can control which posts are seen on their news-feed. By selecting certain settings, they can choose to see all of your company's Facebook posts.

One way users can choose to see all of a business posts is to add that business page to their "Interest Lists".

The second method, is to select 'Get Notifications' after you have liked a page.

Ultimately, Facebook is the most popular social media website on the planet and holds tremendous potential for building relationships and lead generation. Every business has to decide if the amount of leads that are generated, as well as the return on investment (ROI), is dynamic enough to justify the climbing costs of advertising on Facebook.

At JoomConnect, we believe that a comprehensive social media strategy can really work to enhance lead generation and visibility for managed service providers. For more information about our Ultimate Social Media Rig or to speak with one of our marketing professionals about improving your company's brand recognition, call us today at (607) 433-2200 or toll-free (888) 546-4384.