10 Nov The Death of Organic Traffic

Google has been around and its high-end geek-fashion technology offered marketers a sophisticated engine to target engaged prospects. Facebook never matured its product; however, by being the early mover it had an opportunity to create a unique and highly effective marketing platform. I’ve been following ups and downs of Facebook advertising for years. The Street picked on Facebook for immaturity of the product offering. Marketers and otherwise loud bystanders bashed it for the lack of choices & clunky targeting tool. Few small business owners declared Facebook as ineffective.

And everyone with a negative comment had a reason: The Wall Street required certainty and predictability, marketers wanted Facebook to be Google SBOs found it challenging to build campaigns that worked, while larger corporations with bigger budgets & access to talent threw Facebook ads to a standalone social media channel whilst disconnecting the chatter from the rest of the integrated marketing message. I read more and more articles about why Facebook advertising “was not working” and continued creating my campaigns and setting up continuous A/B tests. Bottom line, Facebook was one of the most effective media channels I’ve ever used in my professional career. Think about it, you advertise once and then you forever own the new leads you acquired. Your job become pure engagement and conversion nurturing.

You’d ask, why am I wiring about the death of the organic traffic? Well, the reason Facebook worked was because they offered a unique channel. The ration, the formula for demand & supply was in favor of the advertiser. They didn’t have to be sophisticated and, my guess, did not want to become Google. Simply, it worked because there were more eyes available than advertisements offered. More recently however (in the last year or so), companies honed in on their social media strategy, seemed to have successfully connected it into the rest of their promotional messaging, and polished their Facebook ad practices. So the formula flipped a couple of months ago. Few of my friends with large social following complained about their Pages being “broken” as their fans were not seeing any status updates. Few got upset and shut down their Facebook “shrine”. That’s right, as fewer eyes became available per ad impression, Facebook forced Pages to “buy” traffic by promoting posts. And as a result, Pages no longer get organic eyes. I noticed that the engagement metric (“talking about this”) on my fan page fell from averaging 500-600 to 60-100. Unless I promote a post once in a while, the traffic to my page now depends on the visits by loyal regulars and their friends who are exposed to my “earned media” posts. The message to marketers out there is that cross-pollinating channels, super engaging content, and easy sharing options to amplify earned media reach will become stronger differentiators and will enable you to reach your audience.