With the decline of reach that social platforms have been experiencing, many businesses have let themselves become slightly disconnected with the audiences they have built.
What this means is that a Facebook page used to be able to reach a much higher percentage of the people who have liked that page. But a problem arose as businesses and organizations tried to become more active on social media. The result was a torrent of information that Facebook and other platforms have to figure out how to filter.
After all, people only spend so much time on social media and are not going to see everything their friends, family, new sites and local businesses they have liked are publishing. Beyond that, not all the information is as relevant to people.
So the result is filters. and what ends up getting a preference are the things in our echo chamber from friends family, events, or trending news. Even as a business that has worked hard to build an audience by gathering as many likes as possible, your next post about your service probably will never reach more than 10 of your audience.
What’s worse is companies that have researched this issue have found that as your Facebook page likes increase and you build a bigger audience, your reach actually decreases. Social@Ogilvy did an analysis on large brand pages and found that pages over 500,000 likes had an organic reach of 2. Ouch!
At this point, I usually get one of two reactions when this comes up in conversation. “Wow, I had no idea! Is there another avenue to pursue in order to drive traffic to my website?”. Or, “I have tried boosting my posts on Facebook and wasn’t very impressed with the results.”
Don’t be discouraged.
The reality is, most businesses can leverage social platforms like Facebook by utilizing their advanced targeting tools. The power of those tools alone won’t make your ads/posts successful though. The key to having a successful paid social media campaign is laying out a funnel through which potential customers can move. This funnel must be designed to build value in your product, service or brand and not just immediately ask for a transaction.
There is no one-size-fits-all tactic but rather a basic strategy to be followed.
Your next step should be to develop a methodology for discovering the most effective tactics for your business and a way to execute them.
*Nudge nudge… it helps to have a Geek though.