Is Facebook Marketing Still Relevant?
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this article and answer the question that everyone reading this is dying to know, let’s answer another question first — what exactly is Facebook?
Now, if you’re a marketer, you know there are two very distinct ways you can describe Facebook, or, any social media platform for that matter.
This initial definition is the most common amongst the everyday individual, and something nearly everyone can understand and relate to:
Facebook is a social networking website where users can post comments, share photographs and post links to news or other interesting content on the web, chat live, and watch short-form video.
However, for companies, Facebook becomes more of a tool or asset rather than somewhere to post comments on their friends newest profile update. For marketers and businesses alike, they see Facebook through this definition:
Facebook marketing is the practice of promoting a brand and maintaining its presence on Facebook. Facebook marketing refers to both organic (free) postings/interactions, and paid, or “boosted” posts.
Both of these definitions hold true, however for this post, we’ll be focusing on the latter.
So, is Facebook marketing still relevant? The answer is yes — but, it’s a little more complicated than that.
There once was a time where you could put minimal effort into your Facebook business page, and you would still get tons of traction. Those days, unfortunately, have been lost.
Organic reach has become borderline impossible on Facebook due to constant changes made to its algorithm. The latest change, which is due to roll out sometime this year, targets posts from one’s closest friends and worthwhile content.
Worthwhile content is, according to TechCrunch, based upon surveys Facebook conducted through its newsfeed. It allowed Facebook to understand which types of posts/links people enjoyed engaging with and compared it to what people were already sharing or commenting on. Therefore the traditional promotional update and external article posting now struggle to get attention.
Because of this change, and a massive shift in the algorithms last year, which focused on friends, family, and groups (not pages), Facebook has become a difficult place to grow organically.
According to research conducted in 2018 by Hootsuite and We Are Social, the average organic reach is only about 6.4% of total page likes. This means, for every 100 people who have liked your business page, only about 6 of those people are actually seeing your posts. The study also highlighted that the average engagement rate for all Facebook page posts is only 3.91%.
Those statistics make it sound like the end of Facebook business pages, right?
Thankfully, it’s not.
Organic reach can be difficult, and for some marketers, downright frustrating, but paid advertisements are still great ways to reach your audience. The 2018 study highlighted an increase of 27.3% for average paid reach when compared to total reach.
Paid advertisements have become a staple in Facebook’s marketing technique, and allow your ad to be shown to thousands of people at a time, depending on your set budget and overall goal.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, the number of people who are estimated to see your post every day will vary depending on how much your daily budget is. If my daily budget was $5, anywhere from 957 to 6.0K people would see my advertisement and so on.
This is also great if you’re a business with a small budget as the cost for Facebook advertising, and boosting your posts, is typically quite small. With a well-targeted audience, a few dollars a day can go a long way.
Facebook advertisements are also unique in the way they allow you to target your audience, as seen below.
These distinct targeting features, especially the demographics, interests or behaviors section, allow for a better understanding of your audience. This is one of the big reasons Facebook marketing is still relevant — because of how detailed it’s advertising is.
Looking to target middle-income women whose favourite things to do are drink wine and gossip with their Orange County gal pals? Facebook advertising can do that.
Interested in selling your custom-made pet collars to tech-savvy 20-year-old males with dogs in Vancouver, BC? Facebook can make that happen.
If you’re unsure about who to target, take a look into your business pages’ audience insight. Here you’re able to see what audience is already interested in your product/service, helping you to further narrow down your target market. Rather than creating specific targets, you can also target people who have similar interests as the people who already follow you, aka lookalike audiences.
Not only does Facebook have infinite possibilities for your audience, but they also have a large variety of advertisement placements to choose from. For example, you can choose to post your advertisement as a sponsored post in a users news feed, place it in Facebook’s market place, and more.
As the company also holds Facebook Messenger and Instagram, you’re able to choose advertising options for these two platforms as well.
Facebook is also a great place to create a remarketing strategy. Facebook remarketing is essential when Facebook targets ads to individuals who have already demonstrated an interest in your website. It does this through a small tracking pixel that you can install into your website.
This pixel can track who a user is and what they were doing on your website. This information is then sent back to Facebook, where it can be used for remarketing purposes.
Shown below is where you’re able to select which pixel you would like to use depending on your specific conversion goal:
Remarketing is an effective strategy as it allows brands to regain any lost traffic, especially in terms of cart abandonment. According to this infographic by Moosend, cart abandonment rates are at an average of 69%, which is why utilizing platforms like Facebook for your remarketing strategy is increasingly important. This is especially true as there are over 2 billion monthly active users on the social platform, giving it the second highest audience reach, the first being Google.
Ultimately, Facebook is a great way to maintain your companies presence online, no matter how difficult it can be to increase organic reach. Once your company grows through the use of remarketing campaigns and Facebook advertisements, organic reach will expand naturally.
I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something new about Facebook and how to use it to optimize your marketing strategy!
Interested in learning more about all things digital marketing, branding and development? Check out our publication, or visit us at https://www.frogplum.com/
