Facebook Removing Organic Marketing From Your Timeline. Now What Marketers Can Do?

You must be seeing notable changes to your Facebook timeline since January, haven’t you?

Facebook To Remove Organic Marketing From Time Line

It seems Mark Zuckerberg has kept his word that he made in November 2014 to delimit posts from pages that promote promotional posts pertaining to marketing motives.

This is what he had to say during a Facebook developer conference last year “Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content [promotional page posts] in their News Feeds,” and admitted that brands that post promotional content “will see a significant decrease in distribution.”

Now it is happening in reality; Facebook is slowly restraining organic social marketing on its site to give users a less cluttered timeline that is laden with more meaningful posts than promotional offers and other loopholes that marketers try to trap oblivious users into.

Since long, marketers have tried hard to push advertisements and promotions based on organic reach and engagements to boost their outreach; this was particularly harming Facebook’s objective of providing a social media experience rather than being a mere marketing website akin to e-commerce portals or wholesale bazaars.

Introduce Other Social Relationship Strategies

Ogilvy, a world renowned marketing and PR agency recently reported that in 2014 many large brands’ Facebook posts reached a mere 2% of their fans. This decision by Facebook is bound to kill whatever market these marketers built on Facebook by spending so much money. This is a buzzkill of sorts and it is best if marketers come up with newer Social Relationship Strategies if they are to maintain brand image and outreach.

The best way marketers can save them from being curtailed completely is to start adding social relationship tools to their own websites. If a customer is loyal to your brand, he will surely visit your website to determine your success and backtrack to your Facebook page for being a ‘fan-boy’.

Awards and Rewards

Branded communities are the way to go here; offering a secluded space for fans and loyalists to feel special; being awarded promotional offers and discounts of a rare kind. Most big companies still don’t offer branded communities because they are still unknown to the Facebook’s policy changes; but smart marketers and researchers are already finding potent success by building effective social relationship tools into their own sites. Sony PlayStation’s sales promotion campaign got a humongous 4.5 million hits to its social micro-site greatnessawaits.com which eventually helped PlayStation to outsell Xbox 360 by a huge margin.

Real World Marketing

B2B (business to business) marketing is another workaround where companies rely on specialized companies that handle social media campaigns not just on Facebook, but the real world too in order to successfully focus their social efforts on branded communities and cater to their requirements.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO marketing is currently the most effective platform where any person ‘liking’ or ‘following’ your page or website gets invited to try out promotional offers and codes via emails (e-mailers). The efficacy of e-mailers is so much that they get delivered to the customers almost all of the time, however a paid Facebook promotional post might not get to intended customers or may get overlooked if the customer is not interested in that particular brand

No doubt this move by Facebook is a negative one; it is up to companies to cope up with the jolt and look for other avenues in marketing rather than simply relying on the reach of Facebook in nearly every urban household.

By not making Facebook the centre of their relationship marketing efforts companies can better understand customer needs and portray demographics, better in terms of real-world numbers.