Will Facebook Posting Still Be A Viable Form of Internet Marketing in 2015?

Go back in time a couple of years, and you will see almost all articles advising people on how to promote their business online for minimal expenditure telling you that having a business Facebook page, and getting as many ‘likes’ as possible for it, was a must. Along with Twitter, Facebook provided a way to share new content from your business blog to get more hits on your site (something any SEO consultant would have recommended), to make interested people aware of your promotions, and to build brand awareness and identity, and all for free (if you don’t count the time it takes you to manage the account).

However, most analysts predicting how the shape of social media marketing and internet marketing in general will change in 2015 can see use of this method of marketing dwindling, if not stopping altogether. Why? Because it is no longer anywhere near as effective. Here we look at why:

Saturation
The effectiveness of the most common (read ‘free’) forms of online marketing – i.e. non-promoted tweets and Facebook posts, has been on the decline for some time now, for the simple reason that everybody is doing it. Some analysts believe that most people see about 2000 promotional messages a day, when you consider social networks, Google, TV, billboards, emails, SMS and every other means of advertising. It is clear that you can’t expect miraculous results from your campaign when your ad is one of 2000.

This saturation is still a problem with Twitter marketing (not counting paid promoted tweets), and one that only gets worse as Twitter grows. For Facebook, however, it was only the trigger for something that has made unpaid Facebook posts even worse as a means of advertising.

Who Actually Sees Your Posts?
This is not something all users are aware of, but Facebook no longer shows any user all of the content that the people they are connected with post. It automatically filters the posts and shows only the ones that rank highest according to its rather complex algorithms. There is no setting that can allow a user to see everything, and as Facebook defaults to an even more filtered view (‘Top Stories’), many users are seeing only a small percentage of content. Now, while as we said the filtering algorithm is complex, it does rely heavily on factors like the popularity of the post and how much the user viewing the posts interacts with the poster. This means your business that they have ‘liked’ is competing with all of their best friends and family to even have a chance of being seen, and in most cases businesses will lose that battle by a long margin.

As you can see then, free posts on Facebook are no longer a very smart way to reach your target audience. If your strategy depends heavily on this, you should revise it immediately. If you still want Facebook as your main platform for social media marketing, you will probably need to consider a paid strategy in 2015.

Guest Author: Lolita Di