Small Business Marketing On Facebook With Reduced Organic Reach

Marketers have been complaining for several years about reduced organic reach on Facebook.

There’s no sense in whining about an issue like this because it will not change. Facebook has Wall Street Investors now and has to continue to increase their profits. The easiest way for them to do that is to charge for traffic, visitors, and Likes that were once free.

The solution for many is to pay more. However, doing that puts your business on a slippery slope that leads to reduced profits. There’s certainly nothing wrong with paying for Facebook Ads, but it’s imperative that you understand the drawbacks.

Many advertisers pay for “Like campaigns.” They think of buying Likes from Facebook as similar to getting opt-ins for a mailing list. Recent changes at Facebook make that comparison unreasonable. The social network only shows a minuscule percentage of those who Liked the page your updates.

The best way to expand reach now is by engaging your audience. Fans that you have no engagement stand virtually no chance of seeing your updates. Facebook’s solution is to charge you for Promoted Posts, but in many cases, that’s not justified by the ROI. Once your company is in a position of having to pay for every bit of reach your business gets, you need to consider a new strategy.

Targeting Matters More Than Ever

Small businesses need followers who are targeted and engaged. Whether paying for Ads or inviting friends to Like, the page doesn’t matter, as long as the people who show up will love the content. If they don’t, they’ll ignore your posts, and once Facebook picks up on the lack of interest they’ll stop showing them your content altogether!

It’s better to monitor your Page Insights carefully so that you’re confident your content is moving in the right direction. If you see nothing but Red Ink, it’s time to try different tactics. Effective social media marketing requires monitoring and adapting. No one knows the right content mix until testing proves it.

Ask your audience for feedback when in doubt. Your users will tell you what they want more of and what they’d don’t like. Then it’s a simple matter of producing more of the good stuff and staying away from content that bores people to sleep. If your audience never engages at all, you can be sure you have a content mismatch that needs addressing. Feedback is the fastest way possible to dial your efforts in to get improving results.

Once you’ve found the target audience that is most suitable, your job gets easier. It’s like finally having some wind behind your sails after a long ride of rough sailing!

Build a Community

It’s also crucial to recruit new audience members, and this is where most people and businesses fall short. It’s a ton of work to join groups and create relationships with people in a particular niche. It has to be done, though, because these are the individuals who end up being your ideal prospects. Successful social media markets SEEK out these excellent opportunities, rather than just waiting for them to roll in.

The days of sitting back and hoping things will take care of themselves are OVER. It’s time to build your audience proactively and grow your customer base by hustling. Companies that don’t have the time to handle all of the details themselves will be happy to learn, they don’t have to. Established digital marketing companies offer comprehensive social media marketing packages so that everything is perfect. It’s a simple matter of delegating a job that’s not getting done right to someone who will professionalize your efforts.

It takes teams to engage people across large social platforms. It’s an exceedingly difficult job, and that’s why more small businesses are struggling with their DIY social media efforts.

• Invite and recruit new members to Like pages and join Groups.
• Distribute timely content updates to those channels on a daily basis.
• Pay Facebook to accelerate the process. (Optional)
• Engage with people across all channels.

A typical move for small businesses is to create content and the share it to their social media profiles only. Naturally,  this just doesn’t add up to many visitors.

Recruit New People

You have to distribute your content to people who aren’t likely to see it if you plan on growing. That’s the reason that paid Ads have soared. Effective strategies go beyond just paying, though, because that leaves the company in a dependent state. If Facebook changes their rules again or raises the price of advertising, companies that have bet it all on paid ads will scramble to catch up. A combination of organic and paid methods is the best way to ensure long-term success.

Leaving everything up to a large company like Facebook is dangerous because their interests likely don’t align with your business objectives. They’re looking to make as much profit as possible from their ad campaigns, and they’ll be very aggressive about how they monetize their site and app. As long as you’re aware of this fact and you make arrangement it’s not going to be a problem.

Organic reach will continue to be a battle. However, if you dial in your content to suit the needs of your audience, the job gets that much easier. Consistent may just end up being the crucial factor whether your efforts succeed or not. It’s easy to start off with a bang, but it gets much tougher as time goes on. It pays to be flexible because there will be many more adjustments to make over time. Any company that’s willing to put in the effort (or hire a firm that will do it for them) has a significant advantage over those who are late to the game. Social networks are not going anywhere. People spend the bulk of their online time on them, so you’ll have to adapt your strategy to reach people on these platforms, or you will fall behind! If you have any questions about our social media marketing service, give us a call at 1-877-830-3318!