Start with No

My old twitter friend (Twiend?) Jordan Kretchmer posted a very insightful look at the demise of “free social marketing” over the past 12 months.

The folks at Ogilvy followed with research into the average organic reach on Facebook brand pages as well, showing a curve most downhill skiers would love to take a crack at.

Skiing a downward trend

Organic reach has dropped in half in only 5 months, and the amount of pages with over 500,000 likes has also been cut in half to only 2.11% of all Facebook pages.

Cue massive brand panic.

Gone are the days of cheap organic growth on social media platforms — and while the fingers have been pointing at Facebook as the source of this scourge, Twitter’s own organic reach has also dropped, even below Facebook’s.

Plenty have minds smarter than me have tackled this problem, blaming a range of causalities, most of them centering on algorithm updates. Facebook’s weeding out all the brand posts, they say. Facebook’s making it so we have to pay now, they say.

Yes, they are, and its Facebook’s right to try to make money to continue to operate a free product for its users. It, like Twitter, wants to use the follower/friend dynamic to create a content feed people will actually care about. And it wants to keep providing a free product millions will continue to find valuable.

But this business reality is not the real problem.

The avalanche of brand arrogance

Most social content development cycles come from the point of view of the brand. This is understandable, but think about it for a minute. Consider your brand a friend you kind of like.

You’re cool enough with them to get a drink occasionally, a metaphor apt to liking them on Facebook.

So, you’re out and talking about their lives and all they do is talk about themselves. Constantly. Check out my new doughnut! Or this great offer on Pumpkin Spice lattes. They’re not concerned about you, nor do you let them get a word in.

Is that a relationship you’d want to maintain and have high on your Facebook wall?

The start of a solution — start with no

Like Simon Sinek’s illuminating TedTalk on Starting with Why, I’m simply thinking we need to reframe how we think about creating social content: we need to start with no.

We need to start with the perspective that our audience does not want to really see our posts, doesn’t love the brand, and frankly could care less.

We need to start believing more in the potential value we could provide people, their demonstrated needs in social platforms, and less in how awesome our brand is.

Next we’ll talk about ways to adjust content development process to start from no, and maybe we can start climbing charts more and skiing less.