If Facebook Is Dead, Why Are Many Brands Doing So Awesome?

Since late 2013, it’s been constantly reported that Facebook organic reach is dead. Marketers have thrown up their arms and declared the social network a waste of time and cursed Facebook for trying to charge them to reach their audience (something every other form of advertising does). With so many insisting that the site has killed things for anyone outside of those that will pay-to-play, why are so many big brands seeing such success? What’s happening? Have a look.

Reach Is NOT A Sign Of Social Success

When measuring success, bigger always seems to be better. You want to have big numbers to show off the awesome work you’ve done. The bigger the better. To get numbers that look the best, marketers often look for the largest number they can find. The problem is, those big numbers often mean very little to the actual success. On social, reach is that over-inflated, almost meaningless number.

Reach is the ultimate potential of a Twitter message. It’s the total number of people that could have seen a message. Reach or potential reach is the number of people that follow you, along with the number of people that follow everyone that retweets your message.

If you have 1,000 Twitter followers and tweet once, your reach is 1,000. If you tweet twice, your reach is 2.000 and so-on. If you tweet once and someone with 500 followers retweets you, the message reach is 1,500. You can see how the reach of a message can quickly add up as the messaging quantity and retweets increase. This gives you big numbers in a hurry, but what does it really tell you?

Your Followers Don’t Care About Your Big Event

Events are a huge deal for marketers. They offer an opportunity to engage with current and potential customers and really form a strong connection with them. When events come along, we tend to drop everything and put all efforts into promoting the happenings and hype. We really see this on social media, where our channels fill with messages encouraging people to attend events, plan the sessions they’ll be attending, and book their trips. While it’s great to promote your event, we need to remember one thing: You followers don’t care.

Seize Success With Weekend Social Posts

Weekends are great. They’re a time for us to relax, spend time with friends/family, and forget about work. They’re also when many turn to social media to fill their time and see what’s happening in their online communities. While the weekends mean more people are looking online, few brands are taking advantage of the added flow of traffic. This is your chance to jump in and grab their attention while most social marketers are resting on their laurels (and their asses).

Think Before You Hashtag: Creating #Success

Hashtags are a great way of finding related social content, organizing messages by topic/type, and furthering the reach of our social posts. Twitter’s own research shows that using hashtags can increase engagement for individuals by 100% (2x) and 50% (1.5x) for brands. With the ability to expand the reach of our messaging beyond our normal audience, using hashtags should be something everyone looks to do in their messaging. But like all marketing executions, research before deployment can be the difference between success and #fail.