The days of free marketing on Facebook are over. According to a Social@Ogilvy study of more than 100 Facebook brand pages, the average reach of organic Facebook posts is just 6%, and for large pages with more than 500k fans, that number is only 2%.
As more businesses pay to promote their posts and content, there is increasingly less room for free organic posts on users’ newsfeeds. It is only matter of time before organic Facebook posts’ reach is 0% for all business pages.
What does this mean?
This is bad news for businesses of every size who have spent great amounts of money and time to build their Facebook fan base – as the value of having Facebook fans is now almost nonexistent.
Let’s say your Facebook page has 1000 fans and the average post reaches 2% of them. You can now reach only 20 people with your post, and from them, maybe 2 people will understand your message if you’re lucky – to make it short, there is no marketing value and you’re just wasting your time. It would be like printing out large, expensive banners and setting them up in an empty forest. We don’t do that, so why do we create social media content for ourselves?
Facebook slashing organic reach is good news for businesses that don’t spend their marketing budget on collecting fans, yet at the same time Facebook still remains one of the most effective media channels. This is largely due to its precise targeting options, large audience, and low media price; only now businesses need to invest money in marketing on Facebook.
What Now
This new era of Facebook marketing gives an edge to businesses that have mastered Facebook marketing tools, or have hired agencies to manage their social media marketing.
Read more about Internet marketing from our next blog post “How to Successfully Market Through Facebook”, or let’s meet and we can help you learn everything you need to know.