If you have a Facebook business page and you are diligently posting away with the most compelling content imaginable, chances are, none of your followers are seeing any of it.
“DON’T IGNORE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE”
Your content can have an amazing targeted user reach. As more users join the network, and more information about them is gathered, the targeted reach is growing.
For example, the audience for a campaign begun in May 2011 that targeted automotive engineers was 40,420 users. That same targeting criteria garnered an audience of 7,200,000 people with automotive engineering interests in May 2014.
Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking website, with over 1.76 billion users and over 757 million active users per day. According to a comScore study, one in every seven minutes spent online is spent on Facebook, and 74% of Internet users visit Facebook daily. A 2011 Marketwire study found that 84% of job seekers have a Facebook profile, and 63% of those job seekers engaged in some job-hunting activity on Facebook—and the number of Facebook users has grown by over 300 million since then.
Your organization probably has a Facebook page that you have dedicated time and resources to in order to tap into this amazing audience. But ask yourself—who’s seeing it?
“NOBODY LEAVES THE NEWS FEED”
If you use Facebook, you’ve probably “liked” a business page at some point. But, how many times have you actually left your news feed and gone directly to that brand’s Facebook page? Maybe you’ve clicked through to Chipotle’s page to print a coupon for a free burrito bowl or checked to see if chicken paprikash was today’s special at your local deli. Almost certainly, you didn’t search for the page on your own. Instead, you spotted and clicked on a link in your Facebook news feed. That link was most likely part of a paid promotion.
“NO MORE FREE RIDES”
Two weeks after its IPO, Facebook started to offer “Promoted Posts” and, for all intents and purposes, stopped showing brand page content to users who had previously liked the page and opted in to that brand’s content. Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank, which weighs what they call the “affinity,” “weight,” and “time decay” of content in order to choose what is shown to users in their news feeds. As a result, only a small percentage of your most dedicated and engaged fans will see your content in their newsfeeds. Most likely just 1%. The free ride for businesses on Facebook is over.
The sudden switch to this pay-for-play model was one of the biggest bait-and-switch moves by a major company imaginable—brands that spent their ad dollars to get more likes suddenly found those likes almost completely useless unless they are willing to pay more to promote their individual content to reach their fans. The changes drew incredulous reaction from those who did notice the switch.
“REACHING YOUR FANS AND BEYOND”
But the thing about it is— paid promotion on Facebook actually works, it reaches users where their eyeballs spend the most time. 757 million daily active users. And the results are far better than using a typical Facebook PPC campaign. For example, a Promoted Post campaign for one of my clients had a click-through rate that was 180 times that of a Facebook right-hand column PPC campaign that had iPod giveaway incentives. No shiny Apple product giveaway could match the power of putting engaging content into users’ news feeds.
“Promoted Posts” can distribute items you post on your business or fan page to your fans, their friends, and even thousands of non-fans through interests or other criteria within the news feed. This paid promotion could be a link, photo, status update, video, event or any content that you can share in a Facebook wall post.
A client with just 380 page fans recently spent about the same amount on newspaper ads and a Facebook Event promotion for a career fair, and only 2% of the attendees identified the newspaper ads as where they heard about the event. A boosted post about the event reached 53,856 users. The event was a great success, and the engagement and interaction on the Event page from users who could not physically attend the event but wanted application/career information added to the success. Paid promotion put life into a post that would otherwise only have been seen by 1% of 380 fans.
These are statistics for posts done by one of our clients from October 2013 – February 2014:
Even more amazing than social advertising’s ability to target so specific an audience is its effectiveness. When Facebook shares a fan’s interactions with your brand content with that fan’s friends, the number of clicks and the click-through rate grows enormously. Users are more likely to trust a link or brand content if they see one of their friends trusts it. In many career-oriented posts, users tag other users who may be job searching in the comments section, acting as brand ambassadors and passing along referrals. Add natural curiosity to the mix, and sharing becomes a powerful way to draw users in.
None of this can happen unless a campaign to promote your valuable content is created.
Brian Kirby, Interactive Strategist
In the role of Interactive and Online Marketing Strategist, and leader of NAS’ SmartClicks Center, Brian Kirby helps clients across the U.S. and Canada tap into powerful search engine marketing strategies that can maximize the return on their recruitment investment. He brings more than a dozen years of online marketing experience to the development of pay-per-click campaigns that help clients position their employment brands and career opportunities to best reach their target audiences.
Brian holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Fordham University, and has been Google AdWords certified.
