Why Facebook Marketing isn’t Worthwhile Anymore

Facebook started making inroads into the business realm just a few years after it was launched to the public as a platform for people to interact socially and rekindle the old connections.

In a short span of time, Facebook marketing became THE buzzword and we, as consumers, found ourselves caught up in the ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ frenzy. Brands were rejoicing the fact that a post remotely interesting was helping them gain more and more brand followers which may or may not be turning into buyers, but their brand was getting recognized among a larger band of audience. And that was a pretty good reason to step into the realm.

Now, why do I use everything I refer to in the last paragraph in past tense? Well, even though Facebook marketing is very much alive, it’s seriously lacking on the ‘kicking’ front. On this date in 2014, marketeers have realized the results they are achieving today are 300% lower than the results that were pouring in with similar techniques just a year back. Now, whether you pin it on the Facebook “algorithms” or simply our lack of wherewithal to catch up, Facebook organic promotion is more or less turning into a waste of time and efforts. 

Facebook Pages Seemed Like Great Places to Promote

The first step to Facebook marketing has been creating a brand page that contains an image of your logo and some random picture on the timeline that again represents your brand. On these pages, you create and publish some posts around your brand or around your industry that also happen to intrigue your users and make them share these posts around with their friends. This further helps you grab more eyeballs and maximize your reach by the means of Facebook, which apparently boasts of a massive number of users all across the globe. 

Where Did it Begin to Head South?

Updates! Well, if Google updates weren’t enough, Facebook has time and again rolled its own updates that have been everything but encouraging for the marketeers. Denting their prospects and their initial success rate, the updates have meant t that the efforts made by us get us results that are much poorer than the ones we received in the past organically. 

More or less, it has to do with their endeavor to make more and more money. Unless you’re paying for the advertisements, you aren’t likely to gain much. 

Let’s say your page has some 10000 followers. How many do you wager see your individual posts out of that number? Well, typically, the post won’t be visible to even 50 followers until it does not get a ‘Share’ or ‘Like’. Your 10000 followers are not seeing the post appear on their News Feed and the only chance you have at making it visible to a greater number of people is to promote it. And then, the extra views you get won’t be from your followers, but by those who aren’t following the page and only stumbled upon it after you started promoting it. 

So, visits like these hardly serve any purpose as far as the Facebook presence of your brand is concerned. If you had to shell out huge sums of money from your pocket, you could have anyways done that – with or without Facebook. There are a handful for other ways wherein the money invested in ads for bringing extra traffic are more direct and thus more effective. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re willing to spend more, there are effective ways to make Facebook work for you.

No, Posting on Facebook Groups and Pages Doesn’t Work as well Anymore

Such was the time when you posted an article written on exotic food in the Cooking and Food groups of Facebook, and in minutes, you got hundred of visits and shares. Does that happen anymore? Probably not. And if you are wondering why suddenly you are facing the drought, Facebook has probably punished you and made your posts visible to less and less people even within that group.

The Alternatives

Now, this is where other platforms like Twitter and Google Plus prove to be more useful. While spending a few bucks would really bring in the results with a greater degree of volume, but you don’t have to bring your credit cards in the equation, since you can bring in some good quality traffic by following the recommended routines and procedures of social media marketing.

Google Plus in particular certainly deserves more importances than it typically gets. Whilst it is a massively popular platform, new marketeers or webmasters however straightaway head to Facebook when they begin with their endeavor of starting a blog and promoting it on different platforms. What they need is a focus on Google Plus marketing strategy, which is something they may be missing out on. Google Plus is not a platform you can afford to ignore. Not only are you able to grab more eyeballs for your blog, but you are also pitched better for the search traffic. Well, Google might not have made it official, but observations have been made that if your website has a reasonably good presence on Google Plus, it is likely to be indexed with a greater degree of dominance by the Google search engine crawlers. And that in itself is worth the price of admission to G+. 

Moreover, G+ is filled with communities related to specific genres or themes that you can join and promote your posts on. Let’s say, you are running a blog on entertainment and humor on the lines of Leisure Martini, which is about poetry, humor, movies and much more. Now, with such a blog, you have a whole lot of options. Join the movie communities, the humor communities and other related ones and post your site’s URL there to get maximum leverage out of these groups.

If everything discussed above doesn’t resonate with someone, their blog is probably benefitting from Facebook, or in a greater likelihood, they have had their ears and eyes to the ground. If latter is the case, it’s time to show some urgency without being jittery.