Is Facebook dead for marketeers? No.

It’s the demographics, stupid.

No Facebook isn’t dead yet. And that isn’t likely to change soon. Facebook is the biggest social network ever and sees massive growth in the 50+ demographic. The generation that grew up without computers, without the internet now shares pictures with their grand children and uses FB messenger to stay in touch.

Never before has a website managed to pull that demographic online in massive numbers. Facebook is currently the main reason for many 50+ and 60+ people to buy a smartphone.

Facebook is becoming mainstream. The fate of every hype that eventually becomes so relevant that everyone starts using it.

And yet, we see dozens of articles warning us about Facebook’s coming demise. All based on polls and fueled by stories about teenagers leaving. But that is not the proper metric, not anymore. Why do we judge something based on its attractiveness to a very specific, quickly changing demographic without disposable income? Why are teens the metric?

By now we know what Facebook is all about. It’s a personal, private profile that you share with a limited number of people whom you (once) knew in real life. Pictures and status updates may not be relevant to the world, but they are to that small group of people who care about you. Your content is relevant to a niche, your own niche.

It makes sense that the only people we see leaving are those who don’t yet value “keeping in touch” with people they knew years ago.

Why are marketeers so worried?

One word: Edgerank.

As a free distribution channel, Facebook is dead. We knew that. We all saw organic reach dropped and continued to drop. Eventually, it will hit 0%. The only thing left is viral and paid reach.

We used to think that people who “liked” our page were subscribing to our content. Not anymore. Nowadays that is simply a segmentation for advertising.

Too bad for actual fanpages and people who really want to see all content on a specific page. But what does Facebook gain from a real “subscribe”-button? What does Facebook gain from building a free distribution system for marketeers?

We were naive. We gladly used infrastructure and resources provided by a free website and were baffled when they changed the rules.

It wasn’t made for that.

Organic reach is (almost) dead.

It’s time to accept the new normal. Facebook still is a very good distribution channel for marketeers. It just isn’t free anymore. Go paid or go home.

As a nice bonus for Facebook, this allows them to limit the amount of promotional content people see. This drives up the value of an ad on Facebook and keeps the network pleasant for the users.

So, are we back to square one? Back to when advertising was the only way to do things? Not quite.

It was never really about the platform. The true revolution was not the channel, it was a new way of doing business. If you work at it, you can engage your customers. It’s perfeclty possible to make content that is appreciated and shared. As a company, you can (have to be) human and authentic.

The big paradigm shift in marketing was not social media as a distribution channel, it was open and honest engagement between brands and consumers. That is the real lesson here. It was about how companies engage customers all along.

Another lesson is that a platform you don’t control, will eventually do something you don’t like. Take back control. Make your website easy to use, easy to find and give people valuable, well written content. Use social media to spread it and to start a conversation with (would be) customers. Never depend on the reach or audience on one particular social network and just say no to ego-metrics.

Be relevant and add value.