If you have been using Facebook Business Pages to connect with and inform your subscribers, prospects, clients or customers, you might want to take a look at your recent stats, specifically stats from the last 2 weeks.
Lots of people and businesses have seen their organic reach drop and their messages get across to less than 30% of their fans. If yours hasn’t been hit yet, you’re either very lucky or like George Takei, spared of their wrath for the time being. Turns out Facebook recently tweaked their algorithm to limit the amount of reach businesses and fanpage owners have to their audiences. That is, unless you’re willing to pay for it.
The new algorithm update is basically centered on the fact that a lot of information is being shared on a daily basis. Therefore, your news or information is likely to get knocked out of your subscribers news feed fast.
However, there’s a clause: If you want your news and posts to get to all your fans –people you worked hard and probably paid some advertising dollars to acquire in the first place- you can pay to get your content “boosted” or bumped to the top of the feed or to stay longer and reach more people.
Bottom line, pay up or forget your fans.
Now, I won’t pontificate about Facebook’s policy or even try to justify it. They’re a business and whether we all like it or not, their first and foremost goal is to make profits. They can do whatever they like to please their shareholders. My concern is you. You need to realize that nothing is truly free online. There’s always a price for everything.
If you are not paying, you are the product!
So, What Can You Do?
Always remember that all free platforms like Google+, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many others are just that: platforms. As long as they aren’t within your control, they can become liabilities at any time. Don’t get too comfortable on any of them.
Use them, benefit from them and enjoy them while you can. But, while you’re doing that, start adopting ways to turn the audience there into your fans away from there. Start finding ways to get them into a more controlled environment like your blog and email list. Focus on building and turning them into your asset.
How Can You Do This?
If you haven’t been hit by the new algorithm tweak, you need to move fast now! Find a way to get your audience to your website. If possible, tell them about the impending loss of access to your valuable information and encourage them to join your list or subscribe to your website.
If you have been hit, go ahead and publish the information too because if Facebook’s statement is anything to go by, your reach can only worsen.
Now, if you can afford to Boost your posts, make the payment and broadcast this information and encourage them to join your list. You might even want to tell them that you’ll be using Facebook less and maybe another platform like Pinterest more. By paying the fee, your messages will get to most fans. That way, you don’t get to lose everyone.
To further encourage them, create an informative report that you’ll give away free of charge and use that as an incentive to get them on your list. You could also use anything you think would appeal to your fans. For instance, you could give a 5%-10% discount on all flower orders this Christmas.
But for them to benefit, they’ll need to join your list or subscribe on your website or blog. In fact, you could decide not to tell them anything about Facebook’s latest decision and just promote the report until at least 70% have joined your actual list, then hit the rest with the information. That’s how you can get your audience and fans back.
Has your florist business fanpage been hit on Facebook? Do you think Facebook’s is making the competition tougher for the small business owner? Sound off in the comments section and let’s know what you think.
This is definitely an exceptional blog post on how to salvage the majority of your fans and audience. And I love how you emphasized that one shouldn’t get too comfortable with the social media powerhouses for too long. Because the more they expand, the more they need to sustain themselves by partnering up with other corporations, and having to face reality that paying for ads is inevitable.
And it also brings a reality check that one shouldn’t go by intuition, but also mix in data and hard facts to give themselves a more vicarious and broader way in sustaining organic reach. People seem to garner a predisposition of feeling comfortable for social media platforms being free, and their means of not having to pay at all (or a small amount) for an audience. And like you’ve stated how barely anything is free, especially online, that brings up another concept to take into consideration.
Everyone wants compensation for their actions in some way, and being able to find new ways to entice your audience into stepping forward, and making effort to getting to your e-mail list or landing page is essential. And also allowing them to develop a favoritism in all sorts of aspects of your service rather than just one platform is another concept people don’t heavily consider as well. And being able to be grateful for controlled situations such as e-mail listings and blog sites is always best in having a guarantee.
It allows one to gain assurance of sustainability, and the confidence to experiment, test, and experiment some more until they’ve made the breakthroughs. And not just that, being able to keep in the back of their minds of how they should progressively strive for more new ways, and organize them accordingly. With social powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, they’ll have to rely on algorithms. And as much as the complexity these algorithms will give, they are bounded by parameters, and should not be a crutch for one’s success.
Nice way of informing users to be versatile, because the time where a person can succeed with only one skill-set is slowly fading way. Thanks for the post, Oscar!
There are other social networking sites you can get into. Facebook isn’t the only one.
Though I haven’t noticed that the trend is Facebook is getting lower, I do hope there will be better social networking websites in the future. Hopefully these sites could also be good in terms of marketing for businesses.
Thanks for this awesome post!
I still think it’s worth it, to be honest. I really believe that the rise of other social networks isn’t the demise of Facebook, at least not yet. A lot of the people who join other social networking sites stay on Facebook as well, so you aren’t really losing that many people!