Facebook's Dirty Little Secret - southburnett.com.au

November 11, 2014

by Dafyd Martindale

If you run a South Burnett business and believe the future of online marketing is Facebook, this short column is either going to leave you angry or enlightened.

Why?

Because if you’ve found that your Facebook marketing efforts over the past few years have failed to make any significant difference to your bottom line, there’s a very simple reason for it.

It’s not because you’re doing anything wrong. And it’s not because you’re not working your Facebook page hard enough (presuming you really are working it).

No. The reason your Facebook marketing efforts are falling flat is because Facebook hides nearly all your posts from the very people who’ve asked to see them.

Yes, you read that correctly. But please read it again so it sinks in:

Facebook hides nearly all your posts from the very people who’ve asked to see them.

Why does Facebook do this? There are two simple reasons:

The first is that if Facebook didn’t filter posts, the average user would now receive between 1000 and 1500 posts a day. That would make their news feed unmanageable.

And the second is that Facebook is a business, and “post-hiding” is part of its strategy to make money.

So how many of your posts does Facebook hide?

Well, according to organisations that study these things, barely 6 to 12 per cent of your Facebook “likers” now get to see any post you put up.

And the more likers you get, the fewer get to see them.

Big companies and brands with hundreds of thousands of likers, for instance, are now down to about 3 per cent.

And Facebook ultimately plans to lower this figure to between 1 and 2 per cent.

So if you have 100 page likers and post that you’re running a sale or a special, your post will only appear on the news feeds of between 6 and 12 likers today. In a year’s time, this may have dropped to just 1 or 2 likers.

Worse still, you have no guarantee that the lucky handful of people who do receive your post will even see it.

They may be away on holidays, or maybe they didn’t log onto Facebook that day, or maybe your post has drifted so far down the page that they never scroll that far.

The only way you can ensure more of your likers see your posts is to pay Facebook for the privilege by “promoting” a post.

And at the rates Facebook charge, almost any mainstream mass media will help you reach more people faster and better at less cost.

So is this really the clever, free marketing that social media gurus have been telling you is going to revolutionise the way you do business?

No. It’s not.

Facebook is actually one of the poorest ways to get your message out that the Internet has come up with so far.

The only thing that props up Facebook’s house of cards is that it’s addictive, which can easily blind its most devoted users to how much time they’re wasting on it for the wretchedly small returns it generates.

Not surprisingly, though, most “social media gurus” aren’t talking about this.

For some, it’s because they genuinely don’t know.

For others, it’s because they do but realise their entire business model would collapse if the business community recognised (as most big corporations already have) that Facebook is just another marketing scam foisted on a gullible world.

But don’t believe us.

Here’s a small smattering of the thousands of articles that have begun appearing on the Internet in the last few years which discuss exactly the same thing.

We suggest you read them instead of goofing off on Facebook: