Why The Decline in Facebook Reach is Good For Brands

There has been a lot written about the decline in organic reach on Facebook. The data has been poured over, conspiracy theories have been written, and the overall conclusion has been that Facebook is stealing hard earned reach from page owners, leading many to look for a new area of focus away from Facebook. However, we believe the decline in organic reach on Facebook offers an opportunity for brands, and here’s why.

Before organic reach began its steep decline, all Facebook pages were in a slightly strange position. They had organic reach, generally of around 20-35% of their audience, and were involved in a battle to optimise this to make minor improvements. There was a lot of hoping involved, particularly when it came to the reach of pieces of content that had been expensive to create.

Facebook has naturally seen a decline in organic reach due to the fact that there are more pages than ever before, users on average like more pages, and those pages are creating more content than ever. This leads to a highly competitive space, with pages competing for attention in the News Feed space of their users alongside content from friends, families, groups and events.

In the balance of fairness, it’s also important to mention that not all pages are seeing a big decline in organic reach. In fact some are actually growing. We have a number of clients where organic reach is improving month on month and year on year. There are no tricks involved in this, this just comes from an understanding of the audience, a data led content strategy, and a programme of consistent content optimisation. By applying data to your Facebook content you can see strong improvements, as discussed in our social content eBook recently here.

But for those where organic reach is decreasing, this isn’t necessarily the end of the world. In today’s Facebook, brands and professional marketers have an advantage that they never had before.  Brands are able to promote their content to new audiences, ensure that their best content receives more reach, and specify which audiences see their content based on real life data. The decrease in organic reach has led Facebook to advance their ad product at a fast rate, enabling new targeting options and new ad formats that are highly effective for advertisers.

Previously, brands were competing with all sorts of poorly run pages, some of which were solely concentrated on gaming the Facebook algorithm to get as much reach as possible. Now, brands are in control of their own destiny. Whilst it’s worth optimising and using data to improve your organic reach amongst your fanbase, the key to success now really lies in effective promotion of content through the ads platform.

A large amount of page owners are not serious enough about Facebook marketing to spend budget, and many of the rest are unsure as to how to best promote their content. For brands, this gives a great opportunity to achieve high levels of reach at relatively cost effective levels. With competition still not particularly high, brands can really dominate and achieve fantastic results at low levels of spend.

If you haven’t got involved yet, now is the time. Set a goal for your content, understand your audience, and promote your best posts effectively by using the full range of targeting options in order to succeed.

Don’t see the decline in organic reach as the end of your Facebook marketing. Take the opportunity to grow your reach in a controlled way, amongst the people who you want to see your content.

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Why Banks Are Missing Out on Social Media

Nate Dogg and Warren G weren't talking about financial compliance when they sang "Regulate", but that same title could easily apply here. Though banks are starting to use social media to create a competitive advantage and as a way to build their customer base, they are facing stringent policies and regulations that govern their communication activities. First, let’s look at a few ways in which financial institutes are using different social networks successfully and innovatively without subjecting themselves to FINRA and other compliance activites that apply to sales and marketing activities.

Facebook:

Banks and other financial institutions are using Facebook to listen and to serve their customer base, as well as to make announcements.  

Twitter:

Banks and finance institutes are using twitter to share, listen, ask, and respond to their customers especially in the customer service realm. Another great usage would be to demonstrate thought-leadership and know-how.

 

LinkedIn:

The Finance industry is the 2^nd most active industry on LinkedIn. Typical usage cases involve networking, recruiting employees, spreading company culture, and to build relationships.

 

Foursquare:

Allowing check-ins to branch locations is the key area of use by banks. This allows the banks to give public shout-outs to returning customers. Some banks have even been using Foursquare to verify a client's location as a measure to prevent bank fraud.

 

 

Although it's obvious that social media can pay great dividends to banks and brokers, these financial institutions must tread lightly when integrating social media with sales and marketing efforts. A carefully crafted plan and strategy that adheres to FINRA and SEC standards and regulations is needed. All conversations and anything considered sales/marketing material must be recorded and archived in a manner that does not allow changes or edits in the event of e-discovery or audits for example. There are several other rules that govern messages that may be considered sales and marketing. To understand how financial institutes can reap social media rewards and how regulations like FINRA apply, I have put together a presentation that discusses this below via 10 easy-to-digest concepts and implementation tips.

 

 

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Why Most Corporate Culture Programs Fail

Unless your company acts as a single tribe, which most companies don’t, you don’t have a single corporate culture. Therein lies the problem with most corporate culture initiatives — they start from the wrong premise that companies are people and that they therefore can have one culture. In reality, most companies have multiple cultures which results in having competitive behavior in the wrong place — within their corporate walls instead of outside in the marketplace.

So what is going on here?

As Edward O. Wilson said in his recent book, The Social Conquest of Earth, “People must have tribes. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world.” Tribes have cultures, organizations don’t — unless they are one tribe. Most organizations have many tribes — you may have a developer tribe, a sales tribe, multiple customer service tribes, a cost conscious tribe, an innovator tribe, a middle management tribe, or a tribe of Belgian-American wine drinkers. Having multiple tribes means that you have multiple cultures. Tribes share common systems of beliefs and values, they have their own language, their own rituals, and their own leaders — who may in fact have no place on your management org chart. Having multiple tribes also means that you have many “us vs. them” or “insider vs. outsider” feelings, something that always happen among tribes.

And that is where the internal competition comes from…a generally unhealthy corporate state of affairs if you are competing against a competitor which behaves like a unified tribe and which can channel all their energy to compete in the marketplace or to achieve a “change the world” type goal.

So what does that mean?

For starters, most traditional corporate culture change management programs fail…since most of them start with the assumption that organizations have a culture. The other implication is that by having multiple tribes, and in some cases mutually incompatible tribes, you may waste a lot of energy on infighting instead of innovating and competing in the marketplace.

There are ways to analyze corporate tribal cultures properly, and there are also ways to align them more closely with corporate innovation and collaboration strategies, but more on that later.

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Social Media is Changing Leadership [DATA]

The survey questions gathered data on their perspectives about social media implementation in organizations, particularly related to leadership and how leaders are leveraging social media for organizational results. The results of the survey, completed mostly by individuals who work in organizations that are actively using social tools, provide some interesting insights about the deep ways in which social media has become a disruptive force in our organizations.

Here's some of what the research revealed:

• 84% agree that leadership involvement in social media gives their company a competitive edge.
• 84% agree that communicating core values via social media is integral to leadership (46% strongly agree).
• Only 4% agreed that a leader’s social media involvement should be limited to crisis situations.
• And 44% are concerned about the lack of involvement by their leaders in social media.

However, the research revealed some interesting nuances in terms of what "involvement" actually means when we're talking about the leadership (eg the C-suite).

Even in companies where the leadership was involved in social media, 29% were concerned it wasn’t enough.

The trick, of course, is in understanding a more nuanced definition of “involved.” When respondents elaborated on their answers about leader involvement in social media, they got into some of the grey areas:

• Actually the answer is "kinda." One of our leaders is involved but is quite busy so he can't be as involved as I'd like.  The other is absent.
• 2 out of 8 are involved in FB.  1 out of eight on Twitter, etc.
• Accounts and some activity on twitter, facebook, linkedin
• But not significantly, and not in a coordinated fashion.
• He creates blog entries and some tweets, but it's very spotty and not a continuous policy.

Involvement can mean participation on social media sites, but even participation may vary among leaders both in terms of quality and quantity. So checking the box of “involved” doesn’t necessarily alleviate all concerns. And social media participation in and of itself may not be the most important factor for involvement. 

Why? Because we asked respondents to rate their top four out of twelve leadership traits, and it just so happened that six were traditional command-and-control traits ( providing clear direction, brilliant strategist, leverages best practices, charismatic, holds people accountable, and commands loyalty from employees), whereas the other six were "Humanize" traits -  embraces change, values experimentation and failure, open to diverse perspectives, transparent and shares information freely, comfortable with conflict and participates in social media in his/her own voice.

"Participates on social media in his/her own voice?"  that was the third-lowest on the list.  But four out of the top five were Humanize traits. And arguably, the top choice, "provides clear direction", is both a Humanize trait and a command and control trait depending on whether you emphasize "clear" or "direction".

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