How content marketing is the new SPAM
Do you remember the days when social media were social? Think with me here. About five or so years ago when you had a 1,000 likes / followers on Facebook, you had a reach of 100% when posting. Now it’s between 2 and 10 percent. Having 10% means you’re extremely lucky and 2% you’re just like the rest of us.
I was at the Rotterdam Social Media Week 2016 this week. Everybody was talking about content marketing and influencer marketing. Almost nobody was talking about the statistics above. Sorry, this might be a black mirror I’m holding up for you.
When Facebook is decreasing your reach, they are simultaneously raising the chance of you buying ads the next time
Organic reach falls to 2% (2016)
Social media is on a massive downfall when looking at organic reach of your content. A lot of marketers / communications specialists are not aware of this, because they don’t look at the data or don’t know where to look. The graph below gives you an indication of what the organic reach is of most of the Facebook content you publish from a dataset from an array of pages / companies.
So if you’re only reaching 6% of your audience, then why is everybody investing in content marketing? It’s so much work to produce good content and so little return on activity. Since you’re not paying Facebook to host / distribute your content. But if you do, when it turns into an ad — only then we seem to be bothered with questions like who am I targetting? What is my (conversion) goal? You should always do that. Not only when you’re paying Facebook to distribute your post(s).
Almost all the speakers at Social Media Week are saying that you should invest in posting a lot of meaningful content on your social media. Content marketing is the new way of doing social media. That is where all the fuss about. But think again: when Facebook is decreasing your reach, they are simultaneously raising the chance of you buying their ads the next time you post.
This article is mainly focussing on Facebook (and Instagram). Snapchat for example still has a organic reach of 100%. Only the average user has far less friends on Snapchat. And if you want to reach my dad, Snapchat is not the way. Still: a good social media strategy combines all the channels (that suit you), but that is a different article. Oh and by the way: Facebook Groups still get a 100% reach, are you there yet?
So, should you turn all your posts into ads?
The data disagrees with posting more to reach more people, but what does it really teach us? Since everybody is producing more and more content by the day. The amount of content that is being produced by all these companies and pages is enormous. The equilibrium is passed already: there is too much meaningful content for me to consume. So it turns into spam.
What I do is placing the interesting content in my reading list since 2012, but I never take the time to read these afterwords. So in other words — placing it in the ‘read later’ gives me the psychological justification to do so, but is actually just sitting there and doing nothing. I think almost everybody does this in a certain way, like an e-mail folder with content you should have read.
Paying Facebook can be a tricky one. Yes, you can target better, reach more people — but how much conversion do you need to make it profitable? But I have to say: using look-a-like audiences or retargeting methods on Facebook and Instagram (same company) you can really get a decent conversion rate on low budget campaigns today. This is always subject to change, but still.
What you should be doing: targeting, narrowing it down, picking a goal
First of all: reach should never be your goal. Even if your goal is brand awareness, than you should measure with metrics that measure that with the correct target groups you wish to reach.
Social posts should be about conversion. Selling those jeans, reading your information, activating someone to like your page or letting them to get familiar with your brand. What are your standings? What do you do? Why are you — you?
By targeting / narrowing down your target audience you can reach those that do care for your brand. You should, because if only 6% of your content is reaching your (potential) customer — it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the one shot you have, should be on point. Firing more shots sounds like a logical solution, but it is not. Facebook is limiting your reach on a time basis. So if you post twice in the hour: you’ll reach around 500 people per post and if you post 5 times you get 200 per post. Because they want to sell you ads, of course. Don’t be naive.
You can set-up a group for that niche. Like the sporting fanatics for your clothes store, that only look at the running gear. Why spend your precious reach on sporting goods, where it only accounts for little as 2% of the turnover? Exactly. Newspapers are doing this for years with a sports section.
Using ‘Influencer Marketing’
So is influencer marketing the new big thing? The rest is flocked. But even this new way of using influentials* is still pushing the content-supply line up. It is a good way for some, don’t get me wrong. But you might want to consider using ‘micro-influencers’. These people have far less reach, but are cheaper and have so much more impact.
In The Netherlands (I guess globally as well) almost all ‘social influencers’ as they call themselves account for beauty, health (getting fit, or thin), fashion or gaming. The big reach influentials are in those thin area’s. There is no telecom-market vlogger with millions of followers, but the one freelance journalist on Instagram that is following that market might have only 2.000 followers — but he or she is reaching your target audience. Work with them for maximum impact. And it’s a much more logical to combine that account with 4G transmission technology than a vlogger with teenage audience.
You’d be surprised to see how many brands are working with ‘social influencers’ without having any correlation with them. Below is a sponsored article about Miele washing machines on a Dutch mens lifestyle blog. Normally they write about beards, suits, meat and other manliness. I’m not saying it’s completely off, but I don’t think people go there for washing machines with plants and bags of tea next to it.
Experiment with owning media
If you are a company that can own a form of media, social or non-social, you can grow much faster in reach and impact. If people are on your site you can track them, A/B test them and guide them through your desired journey for them and analyse + optimize all the time.
But this isn’t new. Everybody wanted an app a few years ago and that failed (obviousley). We should be in the post-app era now. But it is the big trend right now; trying / setting up your own social community. Like Dutch insurance company FBTO did with their community / platform ‘Onderling’. The community has over 4.000 members and they vote and discuss the insurance policy on that platform. These people account for the small percentage of customers that really want to interact with your brand (see figure above) and it’s such valuable customer feedback. FBTO chose to facilitate the The Informers. So FBTO knows exactly what their customers want, they are being heard and they can give a massive boost to their customer centricity.
What’s your goal / goals? Why do you want to set-up a social media page / account? Do you have to? Does it suit your organization? Is your target audience there? Will they be? When? What are your goals? What is the alternative? And: Why, why, why, why, why? (5x). Don’t just go up in your content frequency (since that doesn’t help), up your strategy and pick the right traction channels for you. And measure + optimize them constantly.
