Time and time again we hear business owners talk about turning to Facebook to market their business. Makes sense, there are so many active users on Facebook and its free right? Well, maybe…
Lets examine two reasons why you should re-examine your companies investment into Facebook.
ROEI
We all know the term “return on investment”, lets throw a new one at you to consider, “return on effort investment.” Although creating a business page for Facebook and posting is free, your time is not.
So who is generating content for your page and who is posting to Facebook? What is that persons hourly rate worth? The amount of time that is spent Facebooking needs to be considered as in investment in time, and time as you know is not free.
The pages that have the most followers and post engagement are generally ones that are generating a lot of original content that they are feeding out through social media. And they are generally doing so more than once a day, the most popular pages post several times a day.
Then simply take a look at the amount of likes your page has, how much engagement it has, how many new prospects has it reached, and how much new business has actually been generated from all of this effort? Is your return on energy investment worth it?
The News Feed Filter
Did you know that Facebook filters how many of your followers see your posts based on their algorithm? Maybe you have noticed that although you have 1,000 fans that when you post something only “20-30 people saw this post.” Even if someone has liked your page, it is unlikely that they will see what you post.
According to a recent article by Time Magazine Facebook is currently only showing your posts to about 6% of your followers. You can read the whole article here. Why you might ask? Well, the answer is simple. Money.
Facebook is a business and like all businesses we need to make money. It may be disappointing to some but the simple fact of the matter is Facebook will no longer be an effective FREE form to help market your business. Rather if you want to use the popular social media platform to spread your message to your clients and or prospects, you will need to pay in the form of paid ads and boosted posts.
In addition to filtering your posts to your followers, Facebook is getting more stringent on what type of content they want you to post, and like Google they want you to focus on strong, original content. Gone will be the days of re-posting a popular internet meme just to get eyeballs to your page.
The irony is that we will publish this article to our social media pages. The question is how many of you will actually see it if we do not boost the post?