Happy Wednesday everyone! Slowly getting towards the end of the week. I’m keeping up my promise of providing you with some information and blogging regularly. It will more than likely end up being fortnightly or monthly by March but for now, I’m on a roll haha.
So it’s official…Social Media Traffic is DEAD!
if you don’t pay for ads…
Bold statement but I’ve been running some tests and I want to share the results. Let me make things clear, Social Media is important for many reasons, one of which being an SEO factor. If you haven’t got a Google+ page setup for your business go out there and do it NOW. Post regularly on it. Google loves people who use their own platform.
Social media marketing is also very much alive and well. What I’m talking about today is, if you’ve just started a business or are an existing business that begrudges paying for facebook/twitter ads and rely on just the organic traffic, you’re wasting your time.
I use various platforms to help me manage and automate my social media channels and to provide statistics. For pretty much the whole of December, I set up a system to pull great blog posts from others on the internet and share them on my social media. All relevant articles relating to what I do and to help my clients so it certainly wasn’t junk.
For the purpose of these results I’ll be focusing on Facebook as this is my preferred platform of choice most of the time. If you scroll back on my Facebook Page you’ll see all the articles for yourselves.
Here is a screenshot of some of those results.
I will point out there was the odd one that performed a tab better in the 1-1.5% efficiency range but on the whole, it looked like this.Great content but no one saw it which then means no one can engage with it.
Great content but no one saw it which then means no one can engage with it. This has a knock on effect as with Facebook, if your ‘likers’ aren’t regularly engaging with your page, it will be seen by less and less of them. Good old facebook pulling a fast one on people who don’t pay to advertise (it’s the same with Google by the way).
My facebook isn’t the biggest by any means. It’s my plan for 2017 to grow it to 4+ figures which is easily doable but I just never have the time to devote to it. I believe during my experiment I had around 648 likers. On average only between 10-20% of people saw what was put out on my facebook. Not great.
I went on to share a couple of my own posts and blog articles including my first one of 2017 (Top Mistakes Hair & Beauty Salons Make) with paid advertising. The ’10 Reasons you SHOULDN’T work with us’ post I spent around £8 on over 3 days and the blog post I spent £12 over 3 days. I always find Facebook’s estimations of a number of views you’ll get is greatly inflated. Always take the lower number in the bracket they give you as the target. Here are the stats of those posts plus a couple of normal posts either side of them as well (non-paid).
What a difference! So for my first blog post of 2017, I got an almost 10% efficiency rating. Likes, comments and link clicks, all great signals to both Facebook & Google that you’re putting out great content. Facebook will reward you by showing your posts to a few more of your ‘likers’ and eventually, Google should start to appreciate the social media traffic and give you a little bump in the search listings.
You don’t need to pay to boost every post, just the ones that you think will engage the majority of your audience. This will then help the visibility of your non-boosted posts too. I always recommend £12 over a 3 day period to see how it goes. Spending £1 a day just won’t yield results so it’s pretty much a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong, I hate paying to advertise on Facebook as much as everyone else, BUT social media marketing is pretty much one of the cheapest forms of advertising you’ll ever do and can provide a decent return on investment if done right.
If you’re interested in hiring me to put together a social media marketing strategy for you, just drop me a line here.
I hope this helps some of you better understand how facebook works. It relies on businesses to pay for advertising to keep its platform free for users.
I’d appreciate if people could share this article on social media but clicking the buttons below as it may help other business owners too. If you have any comments, suggestions, want me to write about a particular topic please leave your comments below. The more comments the better! 🙂
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