All Facebook recently ran a story with the headline: SHOCKER: 3% To 7.5% Of Fans See Your Page’s Posts. Except Future Buzz readers are already laughing that anyone thinks this is a “shocker.”
Why? Because you already know to focus opt in at the source and de-emphasize time spent in other people’s platforms. And you already understand that stream-based platforms where you don’t control the signal to noise aren’t the same as a self-hosted community.
Only 3 to 7.5% of your fans see posts? Well, yeah, and many probably ignore them anyway.
So all we can do is continue to say what most digital marketers ignore: that the web is more than Facebook and Twitter, and that the reasons to self-publish continue to significantly outweigh the losses of yielding your presence to the stream.
Look, Facebook is fantastic place for a social outpost. Every company should be here, at the minimum to protect your brand and at least syndicate content from your social hub. But you basically give up any competitive search and social advantage if you are purely relying on Facebook to get your messages out there. Distribution platforms such as RSS and email, while not as “sexy,” nearly always have higher % views. That’s because these channels are not stream based, rather timeshifted.
Facebook is but one spoke of a broader mix of channels of distribution for your content. If you’re still making amateur hour mistakes, you’re not even ready for Facebook. Go clean up your own web presence, pivot your marketing to embrace an owned channel and build a platform agnostic community. You should never rely on one traffic source, one social network or one search engine for visitors and community.
The rules can change at any time for each of them, and not all channels are created equal. Diversify and market holistically and you will be well positioned for sustainable returns.
And yes, I made a rage comic for today’s post (thanks John for the creative input).
Uh, Obviously …Your Facebook Updates Are Mostly Ignored is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing
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