Note to marketers who have been investing in Facebook: Fasten your safety belts.
Once again, Mark Zuckerberg is changing the algorithm that determines what users will see in their newsfeed.
Give Facebook credit. They announced some time ago the intent to make social media social again, and the change in algorithm is intended to give more visibility to status updates from friends and family. Positive social engagement should increase as a result.
The ancillary benefit for users is that their newsfeed will not feel bogged down by commercial content. But once again, marketers have to take a hard look at their Facebook spend.
The question: Should brands write off Facebook as a marketing vehicle?
Disclosure: We make no money off media investments that clients make in Facebook. So our views below are relatively unbiased.
And our view on this is no, marketers shouldn’t abandon Facebook as a means of building brand awareness or community involvement.
Rationale: Mark Zuckerberg is walking a tightrope, balancing a publicly traded company’s need to hit quarterly numbers (which comes from ad revenue), and the largest social media platform’s need to remain committed to being essentially social, not commercial.
We think that Facebook’s decisions will pay off in the long run, and marketers should be reassured by the fact that Facebook literally cannot afford to push out brands altogether. So at least in the short term, there will still be opportunity for brands to market through Facebook.
In the midterm, we continue to watch the multi-year trend of sliding Facebook usership among key demographics.
Advice: Target and Moderate
Our position on Facebook is that while there are excellent targeted opportunities on the platform, our clients should not overinvest in a marketing tactic that fluctuates in reach (and therefore value) and which lacks policy transparency.
If you want to talk further about Facebook or targeted marketing over a beverage, please contact us, and stop by for a beverage.
