Facebook Marketing organic reach for business pages plummets as Facebook’s new Pay to Play Model reaches full effect.
Social Media Marketing has become a staple for many businesses looking to enhance their digital presence and brand awareness. However, recent changes on Facebook has made things tough on social media managers with limited or no budget allotted for content marketing.
Recent Facebook algorithm changes have caused major drops in organic reach for advertisers, creating a need to spend money in order to reach target exposure and engagement rates.
The reason for the Facebook pay-to-play model: an overcrowding of business-driven content onto Facebook users’ newsfeeds and an attempt to monetize Facebook business page posts.
Overcrowded Newsfeeds
There are a finite number of posts that a Facebook user will see within a given day. With more and more companies taking their marketing efforts onto social media platforms, newsfeeds had become over-populated with marketing content; something that Facebook believes (and rightfully so) would sour the end-users experience.
Let’s face it, if a Facebook user scrolls through 100 posts on his/her newsfeed a day, they are far less likely to be satisfied if 90 of those posts were from companies looking to market their content to them, leaving only ten posts by friends/acquaintances.
With the pay to play algorithm, Facebook is able to weed out some of these posts by businesses, ensuring the end user sees less marketed content in their newsfeed and more content posted by friends and family. This helps optimize the ratio of social vs marketed content that appears in a user’s newsfeed.
For the opportunistic content marketer, this is a good thing…if a company is developing great content and willing to put some money behind it, it stands a greater chance for getting in front of the target audience.
Law of Demand
Tip of the hat to Mr. Zuckerberg for taking a page out of his old Econ 101 textbook. With so many companies competing to get their content in front a finite audience, the Facebook CEO recognized a surefire way to monetize his platform even more by creating the pay to play algorithm. Now, in order to reach a substantial audience with your content on Facebook, businesses are forced to spend marketing dollars to do so.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The Good News: As mentioned earlier, if you or your company is creating really great content, putting some money into Facebook can really skyrocket exposure and branding efforts. The better news: Facebook advertising in general is still pretty cheap. In most cases the cheapest form of digital advertising on a cost per 1000 basis. (see chart below)
The Bad News: Good Content + Marketing Dollars = Great exposure…unfortunately, without the marketing dollars it becomes extremely difficult to get eyes on your content.
The Ugly: Too many people are throwing away money by paying to market the wrong content. If content is king, then great content is an ace.
