With one billion users worldwide Facebook is hard to ignore as a way to reach your audience using social media.

Facebook has a strong mobile user base, with over half of users accessing the platform on their mobile devices.

And 58% of all users returning to the website daily.

These metrics are just too tempting to miss as a marketing opportunity, but they may also be signalling a shift in the development of social media marketing into a more commercialised platform.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Unfortunately Facebook keeps moving the goal posts. It’s no longer good enough to just create engaging content to build an audience. Recent adjustments on the platform to it’s EdgeRank algorithm, that is meant to reward popular content, means that you’ll be lucky if your non-paid posts get in front of 12% of your audience.

Facebook say that they continue to optimise the news feed to show posts to people based on their likelihood to engage with it. Which is in line with their vision that all content should be as engaging as that shared by friends and family.

Promotion Costs Money

If you want to use Facebook as an effective marketing tool, you’re now going to have to pay for it. I am not talking Facebook Ads to encourage Likes, no this is “Promoted Posts”.

Promoted posts allows you to get greater visibility of your content in your audiences news feed. At first this may seem a bit harsh, after all you’ve worked hard to acquire all of those Likes. You may have even run Facebook ads to obtain them, meaning you’re paying twice to reach the same audience.

The issue is, Facebook is desperate to support it’s failing stock value and it’s now in a position of power with regards commercial operators on its platform. Facebook has never been overly business friendly, in fact business tools have been very slow to come to fruition, but it has sucked businesses in. Many companies have set out their stalls on the platform, invested in support staff, and there is an expectation from their customers that they will be there.

As Facebook commands control over such a large audience it can once again dictate terms to business users who are caught between their customers expectations and achieving an ROI.

And it may well be raising the stakes.

Pay The Piper

As Tim Sanders reports in his post entitled Warning For Facebook Page Owners: Pay The Piper Or Lose Your Following, even promoted posts may be coming less effective, and more expensive.

Social Media has never really been free due to the resource required to run an effective social media strategy, but there has never been much of a monetary cost. This has enabled businesses of all sizes to jump on board and leverage the platforms.

This phase of social media marketing may be coming to an end, and as Tim Sanders states, it may well be time to “Pay the Piper”.

Have you noticed a change with regards to engagement with your audience on Facebook?

If you need help with your online marketing then please get in touch, for a free initial consultation call Sean today on 07850957506.