For a long time, Facebook has been the safe option for people who knew just a little about social media, who wanted to promote their business. Face book was something that those same people played around with day in day out with their friends, so using the site to promote their business was a natural extension of that. All you had to do was to create a fan page, and post the link of your fan page up on your own page, and before you knew it, all of your friends had ‘Liked’ your page, following the usual amount of arm twisting.
Everyone was happy enough with this situation, but then things changed. Back in May, Facebook started to talk about the release of promoted posts. This announcement gave brand pages the ability to approach Facebook and pay them to broadcast their post to a wider audience than they actually had access to. This obviously gave a page or post a much greater reach, which was obviously going to be a major pull for businesses large and small.
This idea in essence makes perfect sense, but the one thing people didn’t count upon, was the effect this would have on all of that brands other posts. As Facebook gave with one hand, it took away with the other. While Facebook made these promoted posts highly visible, they also made their other posts less noticeable. They effectively reduced the nice organic reach of the normal posts, meaning that only a small proportion of the normal posts reached the audience they used to. Facebook offered something new, but unfortunately took something away which they used to offer for free.
Of course, the cost of promoting a post on Facebook depends on the company/brand and the reach they generally have, but even if you are only charged $100 per post, and you want to post to all of your friends, three times a day, it could end up costing you close to $9000 a month! The big problem is that when Facebook started to charge you to promote a post, it started to diminish how many people would see your other posts. This meant of course, that unless you started paying, Facebook would not do for you as it had done before.
So where do we stand now? These days, if you want to see every post from a brand that you have liked, you really do have to go out of your way. You will need to hover your cursor over the ‘Like’ emblem, and click ‘add to interests’, when it appears. Let’s face it; you can’t expect every single one of your followers to go through that process. Naturally, the way around this problem is much the same as the way around anything else in the world of SEO at the moment.
If you write interesting and engaging content, people will want to read it. That way you will get a decent following on Facebook, and a good number of the people who follow your brand on Facebook will actually look out for what you are posting. Make no mistake though; Facebook is not the marketing tool it once was for your business.
If you still want to thrive in terms of your social media offerings, then you might be better placed to approach your local friendly SEO expert! Here in Detroit there is still a vibrant and responsive audience out there who is interested in interesting things. Find a Detroit SEO agency to help you get your social media campaign back on track.
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