I recently read a good article by Jeff Bullas which raised some very good points about Facebook. For people who work within social media it is common knowledge that the proverbial Facebook 'free bus' has gone - this post is for the marketers that perhaps were not fully aware of that. Without alienating you with social media lingo that often gets bounded about ten to the dozen, my summary and takeaways below are in lamens terms.
Jeff's article focuses on the biggest social media platform of them all, Facebook. I think this is a very pertinent topic for many brands that are active on this platform.
For those of you who maybe aren’t too familiar with Facebook media / advertising, I have some bullet points at the bottom of this post that explain what is possible on this medium.
Situation - The ‘Then’
Up until about 2012, Facebook for brands was essentially free. Hoards of brands big and small jumped onto the platform and set up company pages. Much like personal profiles, when a company page created a post (be that words, imagery, link or video), that post was amplified out into their fans newsfeeds. Facebook’s algorithm (this essentially means Facebook’s way of determining who sees the post) was determined by a number of attributes that I won’t bore you with here, but essentially like the Google search engine it comes down to relevance. As with our personal Facebook posts, not all of our friends see our posts - the same was true of Facebook page posts, however the number of fans that organically saw Facebook company page posts (that is there was no media spend on Facebook to reach their fans) was significantly good / high.
Facebook pages grew and grew, brands invested time, budget and effort into the platform, large tribes were formed – Facebook became an ESSENTIAL digital channel to brands aiding in their audience engagement and customer management.
Situation – The ‘Now’
Facebook went public, shareholders want to maximise money through advertising, Facebook’s greatest asset as a marketing tool is data.The result – The Facebook free bus ride for brands is coming to an end. What I mean by that is that the organic reach (number of people that will see the brands post in their news feed) of brand page posts has been and is being ever more so diluted / decreased to as little as 2% of the brand page fans.
Graph by Sprinklr showing the decrease in Facebook brand pages over the past 5 months.
Why?
It’s actually very simple - To drive advertising revenue. If brands want to reach and connect with their audiences (or new audiences) on Facebook they need to pay for it.
Who this affects?
All brands on Facebook that have a Facebook page.
What does this mean? Food for thought
No matter how 'good' your Facebook engagement is, the fact remains that it is becoming ever more limited as Facebook continues to decrease the organic reach of page posts. Many brands are being creative on Social media, have great content plans and are proactively / reactively engaging with their audiences, however as mentioned the free bus with Facebook is truly coming to an end and the brands that succeed on it and maximise its potential are the ones that invest in it.This change in Facebook’s direction is a double edged sword in that their advertising and targeting is actually amazing / best in class.
If you are looking to reach people and really want to target your marketing activities then Facebook media could be great for you depending on your objectives. Below are a few key things that can be achieved through this medium.
- Facebook media can be bought on a performance basis (that is you pay only when an action (such a like or click through) occurs.
- Facebook click through rates (that is the number of people that click on the ad divided by the number of people that saw it) are sometimes in excess of 20times the industry conversion rate.
- The targeting tools for the ads are incredible – You want to target women aged 30-45 that like tennis, chocolate and swimming and live in Cairns and wear leather jackets? Easy.
- Custom audiences – Facebook has the functionality to upload customer emails (it makes them anonymous in the system) and then we can target these people through Facebook ads.
- Custom audiences ‘look-a-likes’ – Using the methodology mentioned above Facebook looks at the user profiles that are uploaded and then is able to create ‘look-a-like’ audiences. This means it finds people that are similar to the audience profiles that were uploaded.
- Retargeting – Facebook media also has the ability to target people who have visited a brands owned websites. This is great for providing secondary messaging to people you know are more interested with the content because they have already been on your website.
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