Last week Facebook announced that it was making changes to brands promotional posts and how often these will be viewed in a fans newsfeed. What’s deemed a promotional post? Well for Facebook these are determined as posts that do these 3 things:
- Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
- Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
- Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
So why should I as a brand marketer care about this? Well Facebook is basically forcing brands to engage in PAID placements to maintain social presence rather than relying on their existing organic reach. The reality is that currently your Facebook posts are only being seen by 1-2% of your total follower base and according to an Ogilvy study this organic reach number has been falling by 0.5% EVERY MONTH and could even hit zero.
So given the above stats why bother with Facebook at all? Whilst its true there are other social platforms out there that will continue to allow you to promote your products (like Pinterest) and grow your following through image curation and ambassador relationships (Instagram) and yes of course you should be investing your social energy into these – Facebook will still be relevant to your marketing strategy and you can still make it work.
How? Your content output will certainly have to change. Questions, competitions & flat images will be out, focusing on creating less but better quality content will be in – generating engaging stories around your brand AND involving your fans in this storytelling. Investing in a video marketing strategy to drive reach and engagement – Video is an incredibly powerful mechanism to communicate a brands values and its currently underused by a large portion of brands. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even stated that he expects most Facebook content will be video based in 5 years time.
Facebook has also proved itself to be an incredibly useful customer service tool and consumers will continue to seek out brands that can give them support or help socially. Investing your time on Facebook in improving customer service responses and being proactive to comments & posts will reap rewards.
Adapting your social marketing strategy to the times and trends will allow you to continue to reach and even grow your hard earned followers, otherwise expect to see a steep decline in your organic reach very soon.