Tag Archives: facebook

January 27, 2014 · 9:33 am

Small Guys, Big Voices

I spent part of the weekend getting caught up on everything going on across the various social networks to which I belong.

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Fr...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s an impossible task, by the way.  It’s really the epitome of living in the moment because one can’t ever really get “caught up” – a post from a week ago is so…last week, I guess.  In any event, it got me thinking about how social media keeps changing and how what I tell clients about optimizing their use of that channel needs to change as well.

Sometimes I think the Internet should be called “The Great Equalizer,” since it puts the small guys on an even footing with the big guys.  It may seem to you as if every company/brand/retailer you know is on Facebook and you’re right: 92% of them use it.  The majority of them are on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and publish some sort of blog.  Unlike regular advertising, a bigger budget doesn’t assure you of bigger visibility.  If as a smaller business you’re going to be good at social media and conduct what some term “social commerce” it’s pretty obvious that you can’t outspend the big guys in your category.  You need to outsmart them with great content, and make wise choices about where to devote resources, both human and financial.

I’ll admit to have hardly ever clicked on an ad on a social site.  I do, however, read posts from brands all the time and once in a while I’ll click-through those to find something that’s piqued my interest.  I’ve even bought something as a result.  I’m not alone.  According to Internet Retailer 2014 Social Media 500, which ranks online merchants on the percentage of site traffic they receive from social networks:

  • Monthly referral traffic to e-commerce sites from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube increased 42% in 2013 to 51.5 million monthly unique visitors from 36.3 million.
  • Social commerce sales retailers raked in, that is, revenue derived from those visitors, jumped nearly 63% to $2.69 billion from $1.65 billion.
  • Spending on social ads by 40 retailers that supplied data increased 400% from 2012 to 2013.

It’s the small guys driving those numbers.  The challenge for them – and maybe for you – is to overcome the clutter in every user’s social landscape. That clutter in not the only issue. The fact that only a tiny fraction of what you post appears in your fans’ news feeds means that you must get the user to seek you out and to do so often enough that the algorithms see you as a close enough “friend” to put your news in those “top news” feeds.  You up to the task?

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December 18, 2013 · 11:08 am

Has Facebook Played Marketers For Suckers?

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Fr...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nearly every client I have worked with in the last few years has had a presence on Facebook and the few exceptions have felt as if they should have one. As you can tell from a number of my posts here on the screed, I’m generally a skeptic of any medium over which a marketer doesn’t have control. Today’s news just reinforces that and makes me wonder if Facebook has been playing the marketing community for suckers. Let’s see what you think.

Facebook puts a fair amount of energy into recruiting brands and other businesses to set up pages.  Once those pages are established, anyone who does it right can tell you that supporting the pages is like the plant (Audrey II) in “Little Shop Of Horrors”: a constant refrain of “feed me.”  Where does that content reside?  Facebook.  Who controls how much of it your “fans” see?  Facebook.  In fact, Facebook themselves said a year ago that pages organically reach about 16% of their fans on average.  Yep – 84% of the people who like a page won’t generally see it unless they take a specific action to seek it out.  In their words: “Newsfeed uses an algorithm to rank content based upon the likely interest to a user to help deliver the most relevant and valuable content.”

That was then.  Facebook recently changed how that algorithm works (which is, obviously, unknown to the brands making investments in the platform and totally out of their control).  Here is one what study found:

Facebook’s December News Feed algorithm change is so far punishing brand pages, regardless of how interested fans are in that page’s content, according to a new analysis by Ignite Social Media. Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

So the 16% has dropped to around 3%.  Of course, Facebook is more than happy to have brands pay to promote their content, the very content that keeps the platform interesting and vital.  Many studies have shown that organic content drives better results than paid yet organic is almost impossibly hard to get front and center.

My take is this.  Facebook may just be playing a con where the mark doesn’t want to give up the investment they’ve already made.  Even if unintentional (BIG stretch there!), they seem to be finding ways of restricting the reach of page fans by page owners as a way to force them to advertise.  These same owners already had to spend money with campaigns to build up fan bases.  Now you want the brands to pay again to reach an audience that has already said they want to receive page updates by “liking” the page.  Put yourself in the place of the social media person at a business who has to explain that one.

People are not the customer on Facebook.  Paying brands are.  As with any business, Facebook won’t be around for the long haul if their priorities are making a buck rather than serving their customers’ needs or by playing them for suckers.  That’s my take.  What’s yours?

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December 5, 2013 · 9:41 am

A Place We Can Call Home

Many of the questions I get asked these days revolve around social media.  You know the usual suspects: Facebook and Twitter.  Sometimes clients want to know about Tumblr or Google+ or Pinterest.  From there the discussions move on to “outliers” such as Vine, Instagram, and others.  We spend a lot of time going over the plusses and minuses as well as how to advance the client’s goals using these platforms.  It’s a valuable exercise but it points out something that I think is given short shrift and which is today’s topic.

The Homestead of Captain Alfred

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every one of the aforementioned proprieties creates next to no content on its own.  Users generate nearly everything.  Unfortunately, everything users – and businesses fall into that category – put out there isn’t presented to the massive user bases these platforms have built.  So, as Facebook said in a New York Times interview:

On any given visit to Facebook, the average user could potentially see about 1,500 items, the company said, from wedding photos posted by a close friend to a mundane notice that an acquaintance is now friends with someone else.  Since no one has time to scroll through that many Facebook posts, items in the feed are ranked to put the most recent and relevant posts near the top.

In fact something like 85% of the people who “like” a page don’t see posts from that page in their news feed on a regular basis.  As a brand, you’re at the mercy of the news feed algorithm which is constantly changing.  So often in the effort to expand our reach to the broadest possible base, we give up control of the distribution in a platform that we don’t control.  We do, however, have something that we can do – and probably are doing – that should, in my opinion, be our tp priority: our own websites.

We own our websites.  They are our home base on the web.  We can control everything on it although as I’ve written before, if you’re permitting comments be judicious in your moderation and be sure you’re behaving in a way that prompts mostly positive user response.  We can be sure that the new visitor’s first encounter works just as well as the long-time fan who checks in every week.  The time and resources to support social are far greater than those required to support home base, and because the number of outlets is expanding, so too are the resources to support them properly.  But even if they were equal to those required for home base and it became an “either/or” choice, I’d advocate quality of encounter along with assured exposure over quantity and less control.

Don’t misunderstand.  I believe strongly that brands (and my clients) need to be in social channels.  Not, however, by letting their web homes get run down while they’re off in cyberspace doing so.  That’s my take – what’s yours?

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