Is Posting on Facebook a Waste of Time?
Short Answer: Yes
Disclaimer: This post was inspired by my observation of business associates of mine who owns or runs small-medium businesses, and are trying to put effort into posting on their Facebook Pages, but with little impact on the bottom line. If this is not you, skip this post.
If this is you wanting to learn how to use Facebook effectively for your business, read on:
Let’s try taking this short questionnaire:
1. Does your business have a broad appeal?
2. Do you have a regular content plan that is highly engaging? (I’m not talking about posting seasonal greetings.)
3. Do you have a sizable (& loyal) fan following that would regularly engage with your Facebook Page?
4. Is your business well-known?
If most of the answers are “No“, chances are, your business is one or more of the following:
1) B2B
2) Service based
3) Highly specialized
4) Not a big brand.
In the past, Facebook Pages thrive easily as most of what they post are seen by the fans. Growing a Facebook Page might make good business sense.
But things have changed since Facebook changed their algorithm on how the posts end up on the home feed.
As a business page, posting content organically has drastically reduced reach, especially if you are of the above type of companies.
If your users don’t engage with your posts, over-time they stop seeing your updates and your page’s EdgeRank drops. If you have managed Pages before, you will probably notice a dramatic decrease in reach of your organic posts.
Therefore, random organic postings is truly a waste of resources and time.
Instead, the best way for businesses today to approach Facebook is to think of it as an advertising platform.
You can build a successful business doing Facebook ads without having consistent organic postings.
You can still build a successful business doing just organic postings but without Facebook ads. (Increasingly Difficult. Especially so depending on your Industry.) Unless you are BuzzFeed, Upviral or the like.
The reality is, many businesses can’t have or don’t have content like these. It is just the nature of the business. Can you imagine a plumbing service doing educational posts on pipes? Or, an accounting firm posting content on accounting news. Interesting? Maybe, but not for me.
Let’s Recap:
When you post content that has few people engaging, it pulls down your page’s EdgeRank, resulting in lower visibility of your post and future posts. Do that enough times and your page disappears from your fans’ home feed. It’s a vicious spiral down obscurity.
Don’t believe me?
When was the last time you saw content from a Page that you once liked, but have not interacted with any of their posts for some time.
That’s right, you probably wouldn’t see their posts anymore.
Facebook For Businesses
As I mentioned earlier, the right way to approach Facebook is that of a paid advertising platform.
With the right Facebook ads strategy – you can scale up your business revenue pretty quickly, and double down on offers and ads that are giving you healthy profits. Do bear in mind this requires in-depth knowledge of Facebook’s targeting options, rigorous testings, trial and error and improvements over time.
It’ll boil down to these 3 components to get a successful advertising campaign (not just Facebook) going:
1. Your Audience
2. Your Offer
3. Your Ad Copy
Nail all three and you’ll likely have a successful run.
Since this isn’t a post about how to run Facebook Ads for Your Business, I’ll defer to Facebook’s Free Training that may get you started. Oh and we did write a post on how to use Facebook’s Audience Insight to get some ideas on how to choose your Facebook Interest Targeting.
ps. One addition to Facebook ads would probably be engaging in an active community on Facebook Groups (not spamming!) It’s basically networking done digitally, and we all know the importance of networking, don’t we? It’s not for every business though.
Hopefully this post gives you some ideas on what to do (and not to do) on Facebook. Let me know what you think in the comments below!
