How is your Facebook business page performing for your business?
After 12 years of maintaining a Facebook business page for Fishbowl PR, we have decided it’s time to say goodbye.
This is based on three main considerations:
- a review of our communication strategy,
- ongoing changes in the algorithm for pages, and
- taking the advice that we give our clients.
Low engagement
In reviewing our communication strategy, the data shows very low engagement on the Facebook page. And it’s not just our page. The results for effort on Facebook have been significantly reducing over time. This article in the Hootsuite blog documents the changes through the years and says “the average organic Facebook Page post sees just 0.07% engagement.”
Obviously, this is the average, so some are faring better than this and some much worse. The Hootsuite article gives guidance on what you need to do to maximise engagement.
The Attention Experts concur. “The Facebook algorithm will reward those who genuinely engage with their audience, create a community, post frequently and implement ads campaigns.”
Many people consider Facebook to be a free tool. It really isn’t; it is time consuming and time is money. If you do all that this article suggests it also costs to advertise on Facebook. If you don’t do some of these tasks, the algorithm reduces your exposure and therefore your chances of engagement.
Questions we ask our clients
Here’s what we ask our clients before we give advice on where they should invest their resources. And if they don’t know the answers, we work with them to find out.
Where do your clients or community spend their time or look for information on the products or services your organisation offers?
One answer which helped with our decision is that our clients don’t look for our services on Facebook. We have kept the business page through the years to experience the Facebook changes first-hand, so that we know what our clients are facing.
Our community and clients are much more active on Linked In and the data shows this clearly.
What does your data reveal? If you are not sure, we can help you gather and analyse the data to make an informed decision about where to invest your efforts.
Why are you using social media?
If you know your community or target clients aren’t using Facebook (or some other tool), ask yourself why you are using it? It may be to give your business another digital asset, which helps search engines prioritise your organisation in searches. However, if your page has limited engagement then it may not be contributing much at all.
How do your audiences prefer to receive information from you? Once you know the answer to this question, if it’s not on social media, then it may be more valuable to invest your resources in the channels your audiences prefer. That might be developing video content for your website, holding events where you can help them in person or giving them a call.
Investigating these questions helps us in shaping our communication strategy. Reviewing it has led to the decision to use our resources in other ways.
Give us a call if you would like to discuss Facebook or develop a communication strategy for your organisation or business.