Brands On Facebook and Twitter, Take Note—Your Reach is Waning
Marketers spending big money and time on Facebook and Twitter may be wasting both, according to a new report from Forrester analyst Nate Elliott titled “Social Relationship Strategies That Work: How to Succeed in Social as Organic Reach Falls Towards Zero.”
According to the report, because so few people view companies' social posts—and even fewer actually engage with them—brands don't really have social relationships with their customers despite their best efforts.
“It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer the relationships that marketing leaders crave. Yet most brands still use these sites as the centerpiece of their social efforts—thereby wasting significant financial, technological, and human resources on social networks that don’t deliver value," Elliott notes. "It’s time for marketers to start building social relationship strategies around sites that can deliver value.”
Ogilvy reported last February that brands on Facebook and Twitter reach only around 2% of fans and followers, and less than 0.1% of them interact with each post on average.
“While they’ll continue to collect billions in display ad revenues, [these platforms] are just not the most important sites for social marketers anymore,” said the Forrester report. According to the research firm's predictions, over the next 18 months, Facebook “will become nothing but a repository for display ads.”
It’s the death knell for organic reach on social, as media companies and publishers regain some of their strength. “If there is a battle for consumer attention in the news feed, the media, celebrities and entertainment companies have won," AdAge notes. “All these changes take us back to a world that will be quite familiar to ad industry veterans: Media companies producing high-quality, engaging content, and advertisers paying to provide relevant commercial messages adjacent to that content.”
In the meantime: What’s a marketer to do? The Forrester report advises two strategies: First, add social relationship tools to your own site, and second, stop making Facebook the center of your relationship marketing.
One brand that has been successfully leveraging community-building features is Sony, with PlayStation’s social microsite called GreatnessAwaits. The site aggregated 75,000 social posts and drew 4.5 million visits at four minutes a visit, catapulting the PlayStation 4 launch to outsell its biggest competitor by nearly 2-to-1.
Another company using a similar tactic is semiconductor manufacturer Analog Devices and their in-house community site EngineerZone, which reached a greater audience than the brand’s entire Facebook page. “Better yet, 90% of EngineerZone users say the community is helpful to their design process,” noted Elliott, “and 76% say the community makes them more likely to buy Analog’s products again in the future.”
The Forrester report favors higher brand engagement on platforms like Instagram, where posts receive a per-follower engagement rate 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter.
As for the lack of growth on Twitter, Elliott notes, it “comes from Twitter’s relative lack of innovation,” according to a New York Times article. “The experience on Twitter today is the same experience people have always had on Twitter.”
Elliott is also down on memes: “Memes are not a marketing tactic…They're selling snake oil.” Bloomberg's recent report concurs with Elliott's claim that "ninety-nine out of 100 of these don’t work."
Not everyone believes the guidelines from Elliott's report are valid. A voice of dissension from Jerry Daykin at The Drum: “The suggestion that brands should turn to their own websites or smaller platforms instead seems even more misguided given the further lack of scale they inevitably have.”
“Reaching a bigger percentage of a smaller number of people still means reaching a small number of people," Daykin adds.
And at the end of the day, notes the NYT, “Marketers have little choice but to play along. Facebook has accumulated one of the biggest vaults of consumer data in the world. It dominates social media advertising the way Google dominates search ads, and analysts say that brands will keep flocking to the service.”
