Organic Reach Is Dying But Your Efforts to Produce Quality Content Shouldn’t
Social media marketing is harder than it looks. Why, there’s more to it than finding the best GIF to use in a post (which itself can be a rather challenging task—I mean, there are only so many GIF-able moments from Keeping Up With the Kardashians).
It took me 10 minutes to find this GIF that’s only somewhat related to my point, thus proving my point.
Perhaps the biggest challenge we face is generating traffic. Indeed, 63% of marketers asked in a HubSpot-sponsored survey think as much. How we get people to take notice of our content is always on our mind. And since at least 2014, it’s been increasingly difficult to get our content in front of people—for free, that is.
The best things in life are suggested donation.
The thing is: the number of people that would see a Facebook business page’s regular, non-promoted posts (the amount is what marketers call “organic reach) has been shrinking. According to one report, organic reach fell from 16.5% in February of 2012 to 6.5% by March of 2014, & the ebb hasn’t stopped. Another analysis concluded that organic reach dropped by 42% in the first half of 2016 alone. Marketers have not taken the news well.
[screams internally]
But that’s not even the worst of it. The number crunchers at Social@Ogilvy for one suspect that the trend will continue until organic reach eventually goes the way of Tyrannosaurus. Indeed, as marketer Joey Hodges puts it: “Organic reach on Facebook is a thing of the past, practically extinct.” Yikes. But marketers need not despair. They just need to return to (or keep on) practicing a few principles, including creating quality content. That means producing material that resonates with the beliefs & interests of your target audiences. But over and above that, marketers need to produce content that is so eye-catchingly original as to be impossible to forget.
“They said WHAT now?”
Of course, a marketer can always just pay for a promoted post (assuming their budget allows for it). This is & (presumable) will always be the sure-fire way to ensure that your content gets noticed. But the question of whether your content will get engagement is a different question entirely. Don’t waste your dollars on content that is anything but smart & imaginative. Really, it doesn’t matter how many people see your post if your post is so uninspired as to inspire no one to engage with it.
Shania is having none of your content
Ultimately, the only way to guarantee that your posts get the kind of engagement you want from them before they are overtaken by the 293,000+ new statuses that are updated every 60 seconds is if they stop people dead in their thumb-scrolling. So, before you click “Post” again on what was originally Zuck’s way of finding a girlfriend, think to yourself: will people remember this, & if not, is it time I set up a meeting with Krissi? Asking such questions, you may very well find yourself in the near future at the Blonde office.
Impossible to forget,
KM