Facebook Zero: Your First Fix Was Free

No more organ­ic reach for busi­nesses — Facebook Zero is here to stay.

Facebook has suc­cess­fully framed the decline of organ­ic reach for Facebook Pages as being con­cerned for the users, prom­ising more vis­ib­il­ity for posts from your social graph.

But from start to fin­ish, this has been a bait-and-switch cam­paign by Facebook to attract brands with organ­ic traffic and then, once these brands have grown depend­ent on that traffic, pull out the plug.

So, Facebook is rap­idly turn­ing into an advert­ising plat­form. How will this affect your Facebook strategy? 

Here goes:

The Decline of Organic Reach on Facebook

We’ve all seen the decline of organ­ic reach for Facebook pages. 

I have it on good author­ity from inside sources on Facebook that it will con­tin­ue to drop for com­mer­cial pages. Inside sources pre­dict that organ­ic reach will hit 0% for non-boos­ted cor­por­ate updates in the not-too-dis­tant future.

Also, Facebook advises against paid cam­paigns aim­ing to get more likes for your page. Having many fans con­nec­ted to your page won’t help you as much as it once did. 

Today that rela­tion­ship between the user and the com­pany is a data point used for paid tar­get­ing, not for organ­ic reach.

More “Paid-First” Strategies

There’s an ongo­ing debate on wheth­er organ­ic reach for Facebook is dead. Here’s the breakdown:

If you don’t pay for reach when post­ing your con­tent, the sales team at Facebook will be the first to explain (if your com­pany is a poten­tial advert­iser) that you won’t get any organ­ic reach for “free.” Organic reach for non-boos­ted com­mer­cial con­tent will likely drop to 0% (“Facebook Zero”).

However, if you boost your updates and you get lots of social reac­tions (shares, likes, com­ments), then Facebook will reward your cam­paign with some added organ­ic reach on top. It is a bonus to encour­age you to con­trib­ute great and free edit­or­i­al-style con­tent to their enter­tain­ment platform.

There’s noth­ing to stop people from shar­ing and dis­cuss­ing your URLs; some social objects will go ‘organ­ic­ally vir­al’ with­in Facebook — but this will be rare from a cor­por­ate perspective. 

Organic reach for Facebook remains a potential. 

Still, if you’re a com­pany pub­lish­ing status updates to reach your fans and cus­tom­ers, you must update your Facebook strategy to a ‘Paid First’ strategy.

How To Deal With Facebook Zero

As PR pro­fes­sion­als, can we turn a blind eye to paid media?

Moving for­ward you might have to be pre­pared to pay to avoid becom­ing invis­ible on Facebook. Here’s how to rethink your strategy:

1. You Must Pay To Play

Making com­pan­ies “pay twice” was a douchebag move on Facebook’s part. However, get­ting emo­tion­al or angry won’t make much of a dif­fer­ence; Facebook’s too big and power­ful to care — and they will get away with it wheth­er you like it. It’s bet­ter to spend your energy on being constructive.

2. Facebook’s Ad Platform is Clever

“The first fix was free,” but now the fun­’s over. Instead, brands have got­ten access to yet anoth­er power­ful pro­gram­mat­ic plat­form. And there’s a skill to get­ting the most out of it, so it’s time to start learn­ing. Facebook have sev­er­al free online courses.

3. Organic Reach is Mostly Dark Anyway

Facebook is still a sig­ni­fic­ant refer­rer of traffic to cor­por­ate web­sites. Much of this is dark social. Not because of what brands pub­lish on their pages but because people share links between them­selves on Facebook. And this has always been a sig­ni­fic­ant Facebook oppor­tun­ity for brands — word-of-mouth.

4. “Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me”

Like most oth­er com­pan­ies, social media sites must some­how mon­et­ise their com­munit­ies. Facebook’s bait-and-switch strategy is com­mon among matur­ing social net­works on the emer­ging Money Web. You must ensure that your brand lever­ages exist­ing oppor­tun­it­ies — without put­ting all eggs in one basket.

5. Build Your Own Direct Audience

How would you reach your brand com­munity if all social net­works dis­ap­peared tomor­row? If you haven’t already, you need to take meas­ures to estab­lish means of dir­ect con­tact (via email com­mu­nic­a­tions, for instance) with your brand audience.

PR Resource: Why We Share on Social Media

Why We Share on Social Media

“People want to be loved; fail­ing that admired; fail­ing that feared; fail­ing that hated and des­pised. They want to evoke some sort of sen­ti­ment. The soul shud­ders before obli­vi­on and seeks con­nec­tion at any price.”
— Hjalmar Söderberg (1869−1941), Swedish author

When we share on social media, we share for a reas­on. And that reas­on typ­ic­ally has some­thing to do with ourselves:

If you can get social media to work for you, great. But you should also be mind­ful not to let the pres­sure get the bet­ter of you.

“A status update with no likes (or a clev­er tweet without retweets) becomes the equi­val­ent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewrit­ten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to con­form to the opin­ions of those around us.”
— Neil Strauss, Wall Street Journal

Learn more: The Narcissistic Principle: Why We Share on Social Media