Facebook organic reach

Beyond the obvious

We’ve been reading the exact same news again and again for months now. Organic reach plummets / crashes / is doomed to end up at 0. Love that vocabulary, full of images and sensationalism. But those many surveys do nothing but state the obvious, pointing fingers to figures that keep on changing, when they should look at what matters the most : business results that we should all get back to, at the end of the day.

It all started with a few misunderstandings : at first it was all about fans, then all about reach and engagement. Now that we entered the pay for play era on social, we’re still digesting this, without even considering what brands should focus on from now on, and what their next moves should be to adapt and flourish in this new era.

We already stated that brands should behave as media more and more. Social media used to be just another platform for them. They forgot for all too long that it implied a change in the way they approached not only marketing but also branding. They have been aware of this for a while, and yet they don’t seem to be able to do much about it and still very much rely on agencies. The thing is, most of the latter (especially the least specialized ones) still struggle to help them become media. That’s why Facebook, when it comes to featuring organic content in the newsfeed, tends to highlight high quality and fresh contents. It is high time for brands to fix that, to rely on the right (media / specialized agency) partner and/or upgrade internal competencies to match their social communities’ expectations. More and more we will see brands partnering with media in a creative and efficient way. More and more we will see those partnerships extend to social platforms, starting with Facebook. Then, reach and engagement figures will be much higher. And it will only be a start.

Reach brings visibility and engagement denotes interest. But less and less they should be regarded as KPIs in themselves: you should consider them as signals rather than KPIs. In other words, reach and engagement have to be increasingly linked to traditional business KPIs such as trafic / leads / customer acquisitions. It is as simple as that. So the next steps for brands is not only to behave more as media, but also to maximize reach, validate interest from their target audiences and amplify messages to meet business results at scale. Maximizing reach cannot be an end in itself anymore, reach has to be leveraged and translated into more concrete KPIs that make sense for brands. It has to be leveraged in a way that requires ads at some point— it’s a matter of targeting, scale and tracking.

It is high time to define which capabilities brands should align to be in a position to articulate social signals to business KPIs. Again this is common sense, but it is at least a good first step to look forward, rather than staying glued to the rear mirror !