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It seems the whole marketing world is screaming “Facebook! Facebook! Facebook!” You’ll hear it everywhere, “You must be on Facebook for business”. But what difference will it really make?
I actually let the majority of small services businesses off the hook by saying, “You’ll never get anywhere near your return on investment using Facebook like you would for database marketing”. Therefore, don’t bother or simply consider Facebook an administrative necessity but don’t expect big rewards or heaps of new clients.
Why? Because for the most part you are putting lots of effort into talking to an empty room.
“The average organic reach for posts from Facebook pages in March 2015 was 2.6 per cent of a brand’s audience ... This percentage dropped to 2.3 per cent for pages with more than one million likes.” (Source: Localytics)
Organic reach is the total number of people whose feeds your posts are seen on. This doesn’t mean they actually look at what is on their feed. They have to be online when it appears.
Why is this happening? Why am I talking to an empty room?
Here are some statistics I found online from a great source, www.marismith.com.
The simplest answer to the decline is there is a significantly greater amount of potential content flooding everyone’s news feeds on a daily basis. The flood of content is caused by several factors, including:
1. The average number of Facebook friends users have is 338
2. Fifteen per cent of Facebook users have more than 500 friends.
3. There are between 1,500 and 15,000 pieces of content that Facebook could potentially show in your news feed each time you log on to the site.
4. The Facebook news feed ranking algorithm (EdgeRank) uses more than 100,000 weights to determine what you’ll see. Examples of weights – how many mutual friends like the person/page/content, how often you interact with the person/page, when the post was published, when the last comment was made, what types of content you typically interact with; watch more videos and Facebook will show you more videos, like more links and Facebook will show you more links.
5. Ultimately, out of the 1,500 to 15,000 potential stories, Facebook passes them through the mega algorithm and displays approximately 300 stories in your feed. This is a personal feed.
Therefore, if you want Facebook to work (better) for you – you’ll have to pay for it. Consider it another avenue to advertise in. By advertising, it’s either buying an ad or paying to promote the post that you put up so it has a wider reach.
The final nail for small business Facebook use was laid for me after I read these statistics from Why Paying for Social is Better Than ‘Doing’ Social. The article was aimed at larger companies, brands that have hundreds of thousands of social media followers. Think how hard small businesses have to work to get even 100 or 1,000 followers.
The premise is, instead of hiring an employee to work on social media for you, you’re better off to just pay to have your posts seen, plus email marketing works too.
Here is an excerpt:
Social media service Buffer recommends that businesses post once a day on Facebook and LinkedIn, and 14 times a day on Twitter. Data shows that posting more often than once per day on Facebook yields heavily decreasing click through rates (for businesses). And more than one email per day is grounds for immediate unsubscribe, but otherwise seven times a week is not too much for good emails. We’ll go with once per weekday to give our hypothetical marketing person the weekend off.
Over the course of a month, here’s what the optimal cadence of content sharing would get a company with 100,000 fans/followers/subscribers:
| Media | Posts | Views | Clicks per month |
| 5 x week | 52,000 | 2,600 | |
| 98 x week | 60,000 | 2,500 | |
| 10 x week | 400,000 | 2,600 | |
| 5 x week | 400,000 reads | 120,000 |
Now please, start working on LinkedIn and enhancing your database.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Debbie Mayo-Smith
Debbie Mayo-Smith is a digital marketing expert and motivational speaker. She gives speeches, seminars and trains on sales and personal productivity, helping professionals get more done in less time and increase profitability.
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