For a long time, business success on Facebook was judged by the number of “fans” following your page. But there were some significant implications when every businessman and businesswoman with a laptop adopted Facebook as their #1 ad platform. Over the last 15 years Facebook went from a breakthrough social sharing platform to Google’s biggest rival for advertisers’ ad spend. Over the years Facebook have had to seriously adapt their platform to keep their revenue curve on the up and up.
More advertisers wanting to pay for ads +
Maxed out audience volumes (everybody has a Facebook account by now) =
Facebook needing to reduce the number of impressions that users see from Business pages organically (as an unpaid post view)
It used to be that by paying for “Page Like Ads”, you could grow your community and have an ongoing customer base forever seeing your organic (unpaid) post content with little to no cost. Very smart and very cost effective.
Now that everyone is seeing results and are ready to pay for more ads, Facebook has come up with several adaptions to their algorithms resulting in only a small fraction of your followers seeing your posts in their Newsfeed organically.
So, are “Follower” bases now rendered useless? Not exactly, they just should no longer be the central focus of you Facebook marketing strategy. Followers support business growth by:
- Making your business seem trustworthy to potential customers viewing your page
- Helping support paid social marketing strategy
Facebook is critical for reaching completely new audiences that aren’t already actively searching for your product online. In fact, 30% of ad marketers believe Facebook to be their #1 ROI driver.
If you’re a business start up just getting on your feet, it’s likely you need sales and not followers. Starting with a digital marketing and content plan will give you leaps and bounds towards revenue growth, whereas followers will only give you baby steps.
The first thing to look at is your online path to conversion that you expect a user to take from Facebook, then find a way to bridge that gap from Facebook Post view to actual customers.
Through the evolution of Facebook for Advertising, several tools have been provided that are pivotal to generating an ROI-focused Facebook strategy. The main one being conversion tracking, which enables tracking and optimisation towards a user action on your website. If you can place a value on an action on your website, then alongside Facebook conversion tracking you can track and optimise towards generating a profit.
More information on Facebook Ads Tools can be found here.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions relating to this article or online advertising opportunities in general.
