Description

This week on the show I’m talking about hosting issues I’ve had this week and how I am working on moving Social 360 over to the Genesis framework, then I get into the big Facebook debate about reach but I look at it from three different perspectives (a normal user, marketers and Facebook) and finally I share with you my tool of the week in Feedly.

You may notice that the show notes are a little different this week as I am working on trying a few different things to see what best serves the needs of you and what works in terms of content creation for myself. I also have been working on moving from a heavily scripted show to one with talking points to this weeks where I tried going without talking points and instead used my show preparation to prepare bullet points that I wanted to cover.

I’m not sure which way works best, but please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know how you feel about the quality of the show and what is or isn’t working for you.

The debate concerning Facebook page reach and engagement levels continues on and I finally have decided to give my opinion on the matter in this weeks podcast. Instead of taking the usual approach and blaming either Facebook or marketers I wanted to take a balanced look at the issue from all that it affects including the regular user, marketers and Facebook.

The Regular User

• In talking to a regular everyday Facebook user (in this instance my wife), she has noticed a decrease in some of the content she sees from pages she has liked
• My wife doesn’t understand why Facebook will not just let her see the content from these pages and feels that Facebook has already given her the tools necessary to hide, block or unlike content from those pages she doesn’t want the information from
• It’s confusing to users to have to leave their news feed and visit a separate page just to see content they have missed
• Many users (myself and my wife included) don’t often visit pages and if the content isn’t seen in the feed it means that it doesn’t get seen at all
• If I find memes and other images funny what right does Facebook have to tell me that memes are of low content and quality and show me less of what I like?
• Why can’t pages offer simple voting mechanisms of asking for likes and shares to determine what the audience likes without being told by Facebook that the reach will suffer?

Marketers

• Marketers have  helped build Facebook to what it is and are understandably upset that the audiences they have built are now unable to see the content they share
• Without the marketers building and sharing this content many users may leave Facebook and this means less eyeballs which leads to less advertisers spending money on the site
• Forcing marketers to pay to play on Facebook is causing alienation and abandonment of pages as many small businesses can’t afford to pay to promote every single post which causes them to leave and look elsewhere for promotion

Facebook

• Facebook is not in business to make your business make money they are in business to make Facebook money
• As a publicly traded company Facebook has a responsibility to its shareholders to earn a profit and as such will look at any possible means to do t his
• Facebook has a responsibility to its users to ensure that they receive the best possible experience on the site possible. If the users news feed is filled with spam and other low quality content the user will use the site less and less which will cause Facebook to lose ad revenue.
• Facebook owns the platform and lets you use it freely to advertise to your audience and now they are asking for some of that back in terms of advertising revenue

Final Thoughts

This is a hot button topic that is not going away soon and Facebook is stuck between creating an experience for users that keeps them coming back to the site, pleasing marketers and page managers and generating revenue to please the shareholders. This is a delicate balancing act that Facebook is going to have to get right as without users advertisers won’t spend money to advertise and without content being generated the users won’t have a news feed full of content that keeps them engaged and coming back. It’s a tough spot for Facebook no matter which angle you look at it from.

This is Facebook’s game though and we have to play by there rules and we also need to remember that advertising has traditionally never been free. You are expected to pay to run print ads in newspapers and magazines, you are expected to pay to produce radio and television spots and are expected to pay to run ads on Google and other digital channels. The free advertising opportunity that social channels offered is coming to an end and this ushers in a maturation of these platforms that will see the good marketers creating content users genuinely want to see and engage with while others will pay to get noticed.

Links

There has been so much really great content written on this subject that I wanted to share with you some of the best stuff that I have come across:

• 4 Ways To Fix Your Facebook Problem
• Reachpocalypse
• Facebook Doesn’t Suck Your Strategy And Attitude Does
• The Great Facebook Swindle And What To Do About It
• Facebook’s Feed Now Punished Pages That Ask For Shares And Likes
• Why Is Facebook Reach Decreasing?

As with every week I like to share with you a favourite website, app or tool of mine that I think can help you in your social media efforts and this week I wanted to share with you my content organization, discovery and curation tool of choice Feedly.

While Feedly is a great way to organize your news feeds it does a lot more than that as it also helps you discover new content through the search features, you can also tag news stories (a feature I use with IFTTT and Evernote) as well as share your content out using built in sharing tools, send it to a read it later app and even keep tabs on content through your mobile device.

With Feedly I have one tool that allows me to find and share great content, save content to read later, and even discover new content and it does all of this for free.

Thank you for listening and your continued support. I would really appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

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The post Episode #10 – Facebook And The Great Reach Debate appeared first on Social 360.