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Facebook kills organic reach; Forrester tells marketers to look elsewhere

By   /  November 19, 2014  /  2 Comments

If you’re attempting organic outreach on Facebook, expect the journey to be uphill and against the wind, both ways. The company announced, via the Facebook Newsroom blog, that people want advertisers to pay Facebook lots of money. I’m paraphrasing, but barely.

Facebook cites “an ongoing survey” involving “hundreds of thousands of people” and says that it shows that people don’t like overly promotional content showing up in their news feed. No kidding. Why not survey kids about their opinions on broccoli? They also show some less than stellar ads to demonstrate what they’re talking about.

badads

The post goes on and on about what a hallowed place the news feed is and how important it is that you see the type of high-quality posts you’ve come to expect. What they gloss over is that Facebook would be more than happy to show this lowbrow ad to you and besmirch the news feed if you paid them to. Which is basically the entire point of this move.

It’s already started

Facebook states that changes will not officially begin to take place until the beginning of 2015, but businesses are already reporting reduced reach through organic efforts. According to this Business Insider article, the ad agency Ogilvy was reporting as far back as February of 2014 that only about 2% of users were seeing companies’ Facebook posts.

Additionally, a study that ran from January to September found that businesses were only able to reach about a quarter of their own fan base organically. Celebrities and news media fared better, with connection rates of 54% and 58%, respectively.

Forrester flat out tells people to look elsewhere

As a result of these changes, Nate Elliott of Forrester has stated that advertisers should “stop making Facebook the center of your relationship marketing efforts” and to add social relationship tools to business websites.

In his Forrester post, Elliott notes that fan interaction is already scraping through the bottom of the barrel and hitting the floor. A mere .07% of top brands have fans that interact with their posts, and the new changes are certain to make things worse. Additionally, if you look at this graph from Forrester, you’ll note that following brands on Facebook is pretty far down the list of things that most people do when they like a company or its products.

forest

Not everyone thinks this is a bad idea

An article in Tonedeaf, an Australian music blog, stated that Facebook wasn’t making it harder for non-label bands to reach fans. According to the author, all that is needed is for bands to create engaging posts that get likes and you’ll do just fine! Except that a lot of brands are doing just that, but as the data I’ve shared above shows, it’s not doing anything for them.

I will say that the rest of the post talks about the importance of interacting with fans and creating a community. Which is true. If people are seeking you out on Facebook, well, great. The problem is that if you’re trying to increase awareness of your band, your product or your whatever, you’re going to run Wile E. Coyote style into a brick wall if you try to do so organically.

About the author

I'm an avid reader of stuff and devour information of all kind. For the past four years, I've been pursuing my passion for writing. When I'm not reading or writing, you'll find me knitting. Follow me on twitter: @MarilynMaupinTS

2 Comments

  1. Decreasing organic reach for promotional content is not going to be a tremendous change to how things are already. Overly promotional or commercial content has never done well on Facebook anyway, so this change shouldn’t impact the way people market on Facebook. If you want to put up promotional ads, you’re going to have to pay to play.

    How Faceboook will algorithmically determine which content is promotional also remains to be seen. If it is anything like they have done in the past, it will be a combination of keyword and user-behavior analysis. Both of these can be games, so this isn’t the end of the world even if Facebook is cracking down on some types of low quality posts.

    • Having to pay to play seems like it will make having a Facebook page with fan likes pretty much irrelevant. We have a Facebook page that has about 2.5K likes, most of those likes were generated by promoting our page. The idea was to grow a FB community with which we can then interact, but that thinking was wrong. I have to pay to reach the people I already paid to reach.

      Rather than promoting my page on FB to grow a community, I will instead be promoting my website 100%.

      I personally used to (naively) think that I could use FB like I do with my email marketing, get subscribers (fan likes) and build a relationship with them by sending them great info (for free). Well, FB has just confirmed to me to stop dreaming, FB likes will never be as valuable as my own email subscribers.

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