How long have you been relying on Facebook to deliver the digital goods for your business? How has it worked so far for you? Are you any more able to get as many clicks from your postings in Facebook groups as you used to, let's say, two years back? Probably not. The reason is simple enough - Facebook has altered its algorithms.
Just like Google launches its updates (like Panda and Hummingbird) much to the displeasure of the blogging audience, Facebook's updates are also not so passionately viewed by the digital marketers of the world. Now, unlike Google, Facebook doesn't penalize the pages unless they the social networks - and its users - consider their content spam. There is, however, a greater problem at hand; the Facebook updates impact all businesses, whether or not they are following the Facebook rules.
The changes in Facebook's algorithms are seemingly aimed to increase the volume of social media marketers who use Facebook ads to promote their products. For those not shelling out ad dollars, however, the biggest source of traffic from a platform like Facebook is the groups and the brand pages of the businesses. These are the entities that brands use to reach a broader breadth of their prospective customers. In last year or so, the dynamics have changed.
Now, even if you are posting a URL in a group of 10,000 members, you aren't getting a large chunk of that audience seeing your post. On your official brand page, the amazingly high number of fans and followers is hardly proving useful. It's not just Facebook, but it's also the other social media platforms that are not as potently effective as they would be if you let loose some cash. On Twitter, your tweets often find themselves lost in a pile of tweets by the people/brands that your followers are following. So, unless you are spending heavily on the Facebook and Twitter ads, you likely aren't getting the kind of results that these platforms may have been providing before.
Even when social media marketing was in its glory days, you needed email marketing for bigger, better results. In the present scenario, email marketing has become all the more critical to the content marketing needs of an enterprise. The difference between, let's say Facebook and emails is that you see the posts by the pages you have liked on your news feed, which is already filled with posts by hundreds of other pages you have liked. As a user, it's impossible to take notice of every single update by every page that that you are following.
Besides, when you are a page owner, every time you post an update on your page, you can have a look at the number that signifies how many people have seen that particular post. The figure, to put it honestly, is discouraging. For example, a company may have 5,000 fans but only 50 can see the post on their news feeds (an organic reach of 1 percent).
Now, as opposed to the above scenario, when you are relying on your email subscriptions, you are relying on the fact that every time you publish a post on your blog, it is being delivered right into the inbox of your subscribers and at a higher rate (assuming deliverability isn't an issue). Thus, there may be a greater probability of the user accessing that particular email and clicking the URL. Of course, each company is different, but marketers should compare their organic reach and click-throughs on Facebook and their open and click-through rates with email.
Maria Mincey is a full-time blogger who loves everything about digital marketing and new technology initiatives. Maria is employed with Druplax, a Custom Drupal Development Company with diversified expertise and global clientèle. Follow her on Twitter: @mariamincey64