Many businesses love the fact that social media is free, and yes, it’s great that it is, but in more recent years, Facebook have cracked down on the way businesses market to its users. Making it much harder through organic posts.
As of March 2019, Social Media platform, Facebook, announced they have over 2.38 billion monthly active users, that’s a hella’ lot of content! You may have noticed on your personal Facebook, the content you see has recently been restricted to friends you communicate with the most, or profiles you visit the most. You may have thousands of Facebook friends, but you will only see a small percentage of their activity on your news feed. Why? Facebook want to make its platform more relevant and personal to a user, therefore pushing business posts to the bottom of the pile.
As a result of this, businesses have been backed into a corner of having little choice but to invest in paid social media advertising. Since introducing business page’s in 2008, Facebook’s revenue has continued to increase at a rapid pace from business advertising alone. In 2009, Facebook launched its geographical targeting for advertisers, – allowing businesses to show posts to only people they want to reach!? Game changer.
In 2012, Facebook introduced ‘The Facebook Exchange’ which allows advertisers to ‘real-time bid’ for adverts. Advertisers can use cookie-based targeting to reach their audience on Facebook with more relevant and timely messaging. With all the innovative methods introduced by Facebook to help advertisers target more specifically, companies started seeing an increase in sales through Facebook advertising, which encouraged Facebook to continue making changes to the way companies can advertise. As a result, in 2013, Facebook also introduced ‘Lookalike audiences’ which allow businesses to reach potential customers like their existing customers, ie. The ones who buy!
These all sound great, right? And they are, however, they come at a price.
Over the years, Facebook have continued to improve the way businesses reach potential customers allowing any monies invested to make a return, of course, this can all be tracked through Facebook’s ads reporting dashboard.
Unfortunately, gone are the days where businesses can make hundreds of sales through organic Facebook posts due to the new privacy rules and limitations on reach, however, the advertising opportunities have excelled, allowing companies to spend money and make money.
