Facebook Marketing Declines: How Business Should React

Do you use Facebook to promote your business?

Are you wondering how the recent Facebook algorithm changes will affect your marketing?

To learn what the future of Facebook means for your brand or business, I interview Mari Smith and Jay Baer for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Mari Smith and Jay Baer. Mari is the co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day and considered to be the world's leading expert on Facebook marketing and Jay is the author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype. He's also host of the Social Pros podcast.

Mari and Jay share how to be successful with Facebook's new algorithm and what these changes mean for your Facebook strategy.

You'll learn how to monitor your reach and engagement, and how to navigate paid versus earned media in your content strategy.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Marketing Declines
Recently, an article by AdAge referenced an official Facebook document that said, "We expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time, as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site."

In other words, Facebook says that they are going to show less of your Facebook updates to your fans and followers. If you want to get seen, you will have to pay to play.

This news has raised a lot of concern among marketers.

Previous changes to the Facebook news feed

Mari explains how up until a few months ago, the algorithm that governs what content goes into the news feed was called EdgeRank. The term used now is the Facebook news feed ranking algorithm.

The formula changed dramatically, with Facebook telling everyone that on any given day, a user can potentially see 1,500 possible stories. A story includes likes, comments, shares, videos and photos.

Once you click Like, Comment or Share, Facebook knows what type of content to show you. Most users are aware that the majority of content shown comes from friends.

This means that business pages struggle to get organic visibility.

On December 2, 2013, Facebook announced they will start to decline or diminish organic reach for pages because users predominantly want to see content from friends and brands that they enjoy interacting with. According to Inside Facebook, studies show more than 40% decreased organic reach on Facebook.

Listen to the show to find out what type of content Facebook will give less weight to.

Is Facebook trying to protect its fans from marketers?

I recently heard Gary Vaynerchuk say that Facebook is trying to protect its fans from marketers. It seems that Facebook has realized that they need to provide a quality user experience, otherwise people won't click on the ads.

Jay explains why Facebook doesn't want to devolve into MySpace. They are now a public company, which needs to continue to generate tons of advertising money. One of the ways to do this is to squeeze the algorithm.

Listen to the show to find out how Facebook has used one of the oldest business playbooks in history to get you hooked.

Marketers see a decline in organic reach

In December, an article by Ignite Social Media showed that brands saw massive declines in organic reach that month.

Jay says that a large number of brands on Facebook have seen a decline in organic reach, but there are other brands that have not been impacted by the change at all.

There are some exceptions to the rule.