What’s the news?
Now that social media platform, especially Facebook has decided to stick to its social media roots, its after-effects have started to show on various brands that depend too much on Facebook and other social media marketing for their website traffic.
A bit in detail
In the latest news, Little Things – A content website dedicated to women was shutdown! Reason? Facebook’s latest algorithm updates that prioritise people’s (family and friends) content over the publishers! And well, that is not the only one which has been suffered because of this algorithm. It includes giants like Buzzfeed which gets its 38% desktop traffic from social media, Independent.co.uk (43.7%), Mashable (28.4%), and New Yorker (26.6%). However, Buzzfeed still relies heavily on social media for their marketing.
Here’s the background on Facebook algorithm–
In his post in January, Mark Zuckerberg announced an F-etox as a part of his New Year’s resolution for Faceboook. That is, the newsfeed algorithm of Facebook will prioritize the content shared by your family members and friends over the content shared by media and brands. With this, Mark expressed his desire to bring people close together by making sure that the Facebook time of people is the ‘time well spent’.
Where do the brands go wrong?
Many brands, (mostly the new, hyper-cool digital natives) are totally into social media. They worship the channels and spend all their energy and money towards social media marketing, completely ignoring the other, less-cooler – traditional digital marketing options! That’s like putting all the eggs in one basket. They don’t just use social media for marketing, but all the other aspects like brand building and so on.
How to fix this?
- Social media, especially Facebook marketing is a total pay-to-play activity now. Understand that marketing on Facebook needs a proper scientific approach and you need to plan your campaigns wisely.
- Don’t invest everything you have in social media. Keep your marketing activities a nice mix of various channels. Did you know? According to Hubspot, email marketing is 40X better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers?
- Have diversified sources for traffic and revenue.
- Focus more on engagement value for your customers than just a page view, page like etc.
- Create a content that’s easily shareable and relates to the audience. This idea will triumph forever!
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