When they first launched, popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter offered an exciting opportunity to relate to customers on a more personal level and to build meaningful, long-term relationships. Brands began to have actual conversations with their customers, becoming a presence in their lives. Some companies got on the content marketing bandwagon, using the opportunity to share interesting content worthy of customers’ attention.
Unfortunately, many brands fell into the same old sales pitch habits on social media. And as customers ignored the “buy me!” messaging, platforms like Facebook restricted how much organic brand content users saw. This triggered a “death spiral” of ever-decreasing brand reach as brand posts saw even less engagement. The result? An almost negligible return for time spent creating all that social media content, across many platforms.
Want to gauge the value of your own social media posts? It’s pretty simple:
Your numbers may shock you, but you aren’t alone. Consider a major customer management software company:
Those 24,000 views (.02% of the 1,433,784 page likes) are actually high for a post. Still, of those views:
All that engagement still doesn’t come close to 1%!
On the other hand, the company claims to reach more than 4.5 million readers each month with its blog. Based on the numbers above, it’s a sure bet those readers aren’t coming from organic social media marketing.
Is it really worth the company’s time, energy and marketing dollars to reach less than 1% of their page followers for not even half a percentage point in engagement? The math just doesn’t add up.
Now, consider the more than 4.5 million people who read the company’s newsletter, most receiving it by email on a regular basis. Even if only 1% of those folks actually read the content and choose to interact with the company, that’s 45,000 people.
Organic social media marketing may be on the way out – but social media is here to stay. Make one change and you’ll start seeing results: switch from a “fuzzy” organic strategy to paid social marketing.
Don’t ditch your social media strategy – make it better! Reach out to see how we can help you shift to targeted paid social media marketing.