Facebook Cut Posts Reach Now What?

In the past few year we have seen Facebook cut post reach several time.  We can expect other companies to follow suit and artificially cut the organic reach of the posts brands and businesses publish on their page.

A couple of years ago Facebook announced that posts only reached 16% of a page followers, last October the average reach dropped to around 8% and it is predicted that before long, 2 to 3% reach will be the norm… Unless brands and businesses start to pay up.

You spent a lot of time, energy and invested a lot of money building a big fan base on you social media pages and now you find out that your fans are not yours but the social media company’s, they have been cutting the organic reach of your posts and now they want you to pay to reach them. It’s called “Pay for Play”.

That’s a tough awakening but not surprising, in time, most of them will become digital advertising platforms and less and less social.  The writing has been on the wall for sometime now.

These platform were not purely social, they were tools to collect information and what do you do with information, you leverage it to generate revenue and now that they are publicly traded, they are pressured to generate revenue and profit.  It’s business

Facebook has probably been the most obvious but make no mistake, it’s only the beginning, the others will follow

So what do you do? 

You don’t put all your eggs in the same basket and when I say basket, I mean social media.  As a rule, and that applies to blogs as well, you don’t build a presence focusing on a platform you do not own or control.

Every platform you don’t control (social media, blogs, photo host, video host…) has an agenda, most likely it is to collect your information to eventually resell it, they have been known to change them at will and interpret them in unpredictable ways

What do you control then?

The only thing you really control is what you own, your self hosted website, your paid for domain name

What is the right strategy then?

I have been preaching for quite some time that you don’t build a strategy around properties you do not own, you build a strategy around something you own, your website.

Take advantage of social media platforms as long as you can to build your brand, build engagement, recognition knowing that it’s only temporary, that the platform could disappear, yes it happens or morph into a paid advertising platform.

Leverage the platforms to drive traffic to your websites.  leverage the platforms to generate leads but extract the information to your database and use email to convert lead to prospect and customer.

What is happening with Facebook should be a wake up call, one that companies like Jack Daniels heard loud and clear.

http://vimeo.com/93279467#embed