Take that look off your Facebook

Don’t think that with 1,000 likes on your project’s Facebook page, all of those followers see your posts in their news feeds, it will be a lot less. In truth, just 20 of them will get your post

If you manage your Facebook business page and you pay close attention to the tallies of ‘views’, ‘engagement’ etc, then you already know those numbers come up a long way short of the tally of your ‘likes’ and ‘follows’. What Facebook calls your ‘reach’ – because the Yanks have a thing about ‘reaching out’ but which I’m going to call ‘penetration’ – has declined radically in recent years. Once upon a time, your project page might manage a lofty 15% penetration but now it can be as little as 2%.

Money and purpose

Facebook cites this as being about getting the site back to its original purpose; to be a platform for you and your friends. Facebook is trying to turn your feed back into a stream of personal posts by friends and cut out the direct marketing. Also, it’s about making money.

Pay for an advertisement and Facebook dials up your business post penetration. In the real world, an advert attracts new eyes to your product and generates new interest but on Facebook, you’re just paying to have more of your existing followers see your posts.

Is the Facebook party over?

Many commentators are saying that ultimately, Facebook will remove all of the aspects of free direct marketing and that posting in any other capacity than your own, personal news feed will be charged for. But why bother? If you have 1,000 followers interested in your product or service, you need to be able to communicate with all of them, not a percentage determined by Facebook.

Your purpose should be singular; get visitors by getting them from Facebook, not on it

Why bother posting on Facebook? Your purpose should be singular; get visitors by getting them off Facebook…

It’s all about Google rankings

When someone wants to know where they can find a local salsa dance class they ask Google. They don’t ask Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter. Google has a sophisticated system for indexing and rating websites but it translates quite simply for users; the websites which have rich, original content and the most activity, score the highest.

That means that if you spend your time creating and posting rich content on Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, then you are scoring Google points for those social networks and not your project website.

Consider this article – the content is being generated in the Graphic Design domain. Sure, we’ll post a link on Facebook but it will be clickbait;

‘PROMOTING YOUR BUSINESS ON FACEBOOK IS A WASTE OF TIME – this is where should you invest your energies…’

A few words in a link on Facebook takes just minutes. The people who click through are traffic to the Graphic Violence website and, thus, contribute to our Google ranking. Thank you very much.

Social network services

Obviously, the social networks do provide a very useful function for your business promotion but that should always be directing traffic to your domain name site.

For online marketing ‘search vs social vs referral’ is a hot topic and well worth a Google if you want to know more and refine your marketing campaigns. If not, just remember that whenever you are spending time and money creating rich, website content, make sure you are doing it in your own domain. Then visit Facebook to post the links out to your content.