The headline, like it was designed to do, caught my attention. "Can your publication survive without Facebook?"
So this is what we've come down to, can a local newspaper, radio or TV station even survive without the audience generated by the social media giant? Maybe I'm in a fantasy world, but to me there is no doubt the answer is yes. Hell yes, maybe even.
The article chronicles a Danish publisher, TV Midtvest who went dark on Facebook for two weeks to see what the impact was to their website for their eight regional TV stations in Denmark. Their head of digital, Nadia Nikolajeva spoke about their experiment at the INMA Media Innovation Week in Amsterdam in late September.
They went cold turkey, no Facebook posts for 14 days, having only a post that invited people to go to their website instead. What happened is a little alarming. Site visitors dropped 27% during the two weeks, and that's a lot. But page views only dropped 10%. People still found their way to the website, without the prompting from Facebook.
Facebook for most websites provides a lot of "one and done" traffic, meaning they come for the story that showed up on their feed and never click on another story while visiting your site. Every page view is important, but to me this shows one of the problems with social media. Is social media traffic coming to your website really meaningful traffic? I haven't seen, but wonder if there is research that shows how often visitors to a website click on local banner ads compared with visitors who came to the site by other means? The bounce rate is so high for social media generated traffic, I would bet very few interact with anything else on the site, let alone banner advertising which pays the bills.
I look at results from my own site, and I believe you can survive without Facebook. Given all the recent news about the US Supreme Court Justice hearings in Washington, DC, one of our state's US Senator's announced he would not vote for confirmation. This story broke on a Friday midday, and we immediately put a story up online about this decision. We also posted about it on Facebook, and the reaction exploded.
The Facebook post about the story blew up. We had a lot of reactions, comments and shares of this story which produce a very high reach on the platform. This post was one of our better performing posts on the site in some time. Hundreds of comments on Facebook, yet barely a whisper in terms of traffic on my site. People react on Facebook, but they did not read the details on the story online. We did a great job of creating content and page views for Facebook, but what did we do for our own site? Very little, it turned out.
The same was true with a several Facebook Live projects we've tried. Our most successful Facebook Live broadcast was with a local singer that made it to the finals of NBC's The Voice. Our views on Facebook were very strong. Doing Facebook Live, you could make the case, helped make our brand stronger and more top of mind. But there was no immediate impact on our revenue or bottom line. We were generating page views and revenue for Facebook.
Publishers need to stay focused on driving traffic to their site. It is going to be difficult enough making enough money on digital based products with dwindling cpm charges, let alone if publishers end up generating traffic for social media instead of themselves. Using Facebook and other social media outlets as a source for traffic instead of being the source for them may end up one of the industry's biggest challenges in the near future.
My example of the story on the Supreme Court shows that the habits of readers have changed. The headline sufficed, and they did not bother to actually read the content. What started at USA Today by giving us snippets of content has been reduced to simple headlines as all consumers want. That is scary for the news business, and for the republic in which we live.
So the answer is to innovate; something most media outlets talk about more than doing. In the case of TV Midtvest, they did take action. As the article wrote, "TV Midtvest realised they can innovate and develop in-house tools that will allow journalists to communicate with their audience while retaining control over users data. They even took a step further and developed new services like a streaming app, that saw 20,000 downloads since its launch in spring."
Developing an app might not be within the grasp of all online publishers. But there are things that can be done to help drive traffic. To me, one of the most obvious is to use Facebook to promote your brand, and ways for consumers to interact.
If you do not have a email database, then start one. Use Facebook to promote its existence and help convert those Facebook likes into deliverable email addressed. Then you can sell your email newsletters to advertisers, making money from the email. Those emails sent daily, weekly or whatever works best for your news cycle, will help drive traffic back to your website. And not to Facebook.
I'm not anti-Facebook or anti-social media. There's a decent chance you made it to this post from a social media post. But I'm using social media to promote my website, not as a substitute for my website. I think a lot of websites, particularly those from media outlets, have forgotten that point. We need to use Facebook to promote our site, but figure out ways to drive web traffic to our sites and not Facebook.
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