It has been nearly a year in the making, and by mid January the marketing landscape will change significantly for many small business operators. Many businesses have built up and now rely heavily on organic reach of their audience through their Facebook page.
It's hard to imagine that the reach of Facebook posts would get worse,though that is the expected outcome. This past week, Forrester Research said that posts to Facebook by well-known brands are only reaching 2% of their fans and followers currently. That is a significant drop from a year ago, before Facebook started to put a squeeze on business pages.
The Wall Street Journal this weekend did a fabulous piece on this topic, and the possible impact on small businesses. Written by Angus Loten, Adam Janofsky and Reed Albergotti, the article goes into some depth on the Forrester Research and other facts surrounding this change.
This isn't really a surprise. When Facebook became a publicly traded company, many experts started questioning and pushing for more and more monetization of the platform. Facebook has responded with strong advertising platforms for desktop and mobile. So forcing businesses to pay to promote their posts isn't a stretch, and is still likely a good marketing choice for some businesses.
But this does open up the door for a lot of healthy competition between digital options and legacy media. As I've been out on sales calls over the past two years, the number one competitor that I've faced has been free posts on Facebook. It is hard to beat free.
Now that those posts are going to fewer consumers, and eventually to none without paying to promote, the playing field is a little more even. Newspapers have seen this type of disruption before, with private party classifieds going the free route to CraigsList. But in this local battle with Facebook, they are taking the free option off the table, and we can now compare value and reach side by side.
In the experiments I've done with placing Facebook ads, the results were quite mixed. Specific to Facebook, I found that people who went there were there to be social, not shop. I think Facebook has done some refinement and increased targeting since I first tried those ads, but the fact is still that Facebook is first and foremost a social platform.
If you are going to be targeting customers, search engine marketing (SEM) might be a better options. Facebook is a cold call, while Google key words are a hot prospect who has already specifically reached out for information by search.
Whatever your feelings are, the approach for media reps in 2015 has to be aggressive with small and medium businesses that have relied on free Facebook for marketing. The free option is going away, but the need to speak to those customers has not. The question now is whether that option remains with Facebook or other media options; all of which now will cost the business.
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