Starting in January, Facebook decided to make it even harder for brands to advertise for free. Their message being: if you want to advertise on Facebook, you have to pay for it. According to a Facebook blog post, the company will be limiting the number of “promotional page posts,” meaning there will be fewer posts from brands asking you to buy products or enter promotions and sweepstakes. This also includes brand posts that reuse the exact same content from ads. Basically, Facebook is cracking down on brands trying to share ad-style content with their followers for free.
This Facebook crackdown is changing the game for advertisers, who were originally encouraged to build up their “like” totals on brand pages so they could share ad-style content for free. While business pages on Facebook boasted an average 16% reach in 2012, they are lucky to reach 2% today organically. This is a clear reminder that brands don’t own the audience they get on the network, they are simply renting them from Facebook. Facebook is also saying goodbye to the idea that good content will be rewarded regardless of its algorithm.
Let’s say your brand puts out creative, quality Facebook posts on a regular basis, but you aren’t paying to promote these posts. Your ads simply won’t get shown to any more than a negligible fraction of your followers. Facebook has completely transitioned into a proper media channel, like television and radio, where no brand presence is for free.
What does this mean for your brand?
This is just another example that shows how important it is to have a digital marketing agency like Mediaura representing you. Smart businesses know they must adapt by beefing up their social media budgets and having an agency like Mediaura manage their Facebook ad targeting tools.
There are definite positives that can come from this change for your business:
Embracing the death of organic reach presents a golden opportunity for Mediaura to increase your ROI and generate new, ongoing revenue streams for your company. Facebook still serves as a powerful lead generation channel. Moving beyond organic reach opens up bandwidth to advertise with promoted content, which is something we know a thing or two about, and this can yield better conversion than regular ads.
And not all is lost in regards to organic publishing. Continuing to publish your content can offer you a powerful “click signal” when readers react, and that can inform your paid buys, giving you both bonus reach and free ways to do multivariate testing. Cause-related marketing, testimonials and other forms of emotion-driven storytelling will also continue to do well.
We can’t forget that this change is good for users, which means that marketers will see positive results in the long run because creating a better user experience means continued growth of users on Facebook. More users mean more data and ultimately this means more powerful ad targeting.
Mediaura Can Help
Mediaura is able to equip your brand with high-quality content and high engagement to ensure you reach your audience. We know how to create something that people want to see more of and want to share. Let Mediaura help you provide informative, educational and entertaining original content throughout your social media presence. For additional information on social media management, please Contact Us or call Mediaura at (502) 554-9649 to get your social media presence where it needs to be.
