Where should you focus your online marketing efforts during 2015? In previous year's campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites would have been high up on the priority list. Thanks to new policies and a need to maximise their own revenue, everyone should be wary of handing over control of the conversations to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This year should be the year you take back control of the conversation.
As a recent post on Priceonomics alludes to, many brands have spent large amounts of marketing budget to send traffic to their Facebook Pages. The bargain was simple - A brand would sign up to Facebook and start a page. It would have consumers follow this page, and when it posted a message on the page, it would appear in the timeline of everyone following the page.
That bargain has now changed. Facebook no longer pushes messages into timelines from a page, unless it has already gained traction within the followers of a page. Which leads to an almost delightful catch-22 of 'you can't get your message out unless you have got your message out'. It's not a full catch-22, because Facebook has a simple way of jump-starting the process... Pay to promote the message, have some of your followers pick up on the post, and if they like it, Facebook might start giving it some organic reach to a proportion of the page's remaining followers.
Imagine if the marketing budgets for the Facebook Pages had been spent on bringing the audience to a property that was under the complete control of a brand. It might seem old-fashioned in a world of social media and user-created content indexes, but if these consumers had signed up to an email newsletter a year ago, the brand would still have that direct one-to-one relationship today, there would be no reliance on a mysterious traffic algorithm showing the content, and no extra budget would have to be spent to promote the message to try to get it read.
I personally use Facebook, but many of the posts that I make are actually mirrors of the posts I make on my personal blog. With years of links, comments, and thoughts, my personal blog belongs to me, is under my control, and I have all the data of the posts, and the readers eyeballs, for my own use.
The same is true of my newsletter. I have those email addresses and it gives me the ability to write to my readers directly and with no middle-men.
Many properties use newsletters to reach out to a large audience, and to ensure timely messages arrive to every member of the community. Voucher and deal sites are a prime example where Facebook is limiting, but direct contact is the preferred option. Newsletters can be used to create a more personal approach, for people to read a brand's message on their own time.
Facebook at least had the decency to do a very public and slow ramp-down of posts from a brand's Facebook Page showing up organically, letting it be known that by the end of 2014 'organic reach will be expected to reach zero' on more than one occasion, and narrowing down the options for promotions and third-party applications to promote the liking of a brand's page.
Other sites may not provide as much warning. Twitter is a key driver of traffic, but the public company's focus is not outbound traffic to your site, it is maximizing revenue to its shareholders. Any change in strategy from CEO Dick Costolo could have a knock-on effect on any brand that relies on Twitter. Neither may a decrease in referrals be down to a deliberate change in policy. Break through any arbitrary limit and down the rankings and timeline prominence you go.
With the fractured media landscape of television, radio, and media consumption, making it harder to reach out to audiences, the internet allows brands to have a much closer relationship with their customers. It reduces the distance between the two parties and it promotes closer emotional ties.
Why would you want to place a filter that is not under your control between yourself and your followers? Why would you want to place a filter that could effectively delete the relationship between the two parties. Why would you risk your business on the goodwill of a company whose job is to maximise a return for shareholders or investors?
Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Digg, Reddit, and many other social sites do have advantages - they have huge reach at scale, and they can deliver viral wins and spike traffic numbers over a short period of time. Any brand putting these properties as the main destinations in a marketing plan needs to seriously consider the power that they are handing over.
Use the social media properties as second tier interactions, and use them to funnel people to properties that are under total control of a brand (a website, an RSS feed for media delivery, an email newsletter subscription page). This makes far more sense than promoting someone else's site where you have a landing page. It reduces the risk of relying on a third-party, it keeps the brand in control, and it builds the relation between customer and brand (as opposed to between the customer and Facebook).
Stop building value for the social networks, take control of your message and your customers, and own your own presence online.
