facebook change

Facebook’s Major Change: Why Email Marketing Is the Best Way to Reach Your Tribe

Facebook has announced its algorithm is changing once again, to decrease the organic reach of pages even more. Content posted by businesses, brands and media can expect their posts to appear in even less feeds. All in the name of “meaningful interactions between people,” Mark Zuckerberg says.

Learn more about how this decision will affect you. Also, see why email marketing remains the best way to reach your audience.

Mark Zuckerberg’s most recent post started a passionate conversation among marketers and social media experts. The discussion is actually older.

It started back in 2012, when the organic reach of Facebook pages dropped to 16%. Then, it culminated in 2014, when it declined again, to 6.5%.

Since then, that number has been getting lower and lower, with pages receiving an average organic reach of only 2% in 2017.

How Facebook’s change affects you

So, what does this mean if you’re in digital marketing? Also, what does it mean to us as Facebook users? Let’s take a look at some of the most significant aspects.

More content from friends, less from brands

This year brings more bad news for page creators who have invested in building strong communities on Facebook. “The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard. It should encourage meaningful interactions between people,” Mark Zuckerberg posted yesterday on his profile.

Facebook’s creator explained that the reason behind their new change of algorithm is that businesses are crowding users’ News Feeds. “Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. (…)

“Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other. (…) Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions. We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products,” Zuckerberg added.

Stay away from engagement and tag bait posts

The new algorithm is going to flag posts that use engagement or tag bait. “To help us foster more authentic engagement, teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait. Posts that use this tactic will be shown less in News Feed.”

If you don’t know what engagement bait posts are, they refer to posts that contain call-to-actions such as: “Like this post if…,” “Share this post if…” Tag bait posts are those that invite you to “tag a friend” who is likely to resonate with the content. So be careful with this type of posts, as Facebook will decrease their engagement dramatically.

Boost or post in vain

So, if you have a business Facebook page, how do you make sure your content actually reaches your tribe? Several social media experts have predicted, along the years, that paying for ads is going to be the only way to receive decent engagement on the platform.

What Facebook now does, through Zuckerberg’s announcement, is to confirm that theory. Eventually, businesses and brands should expect organic reach to arrive at zero, which means that no matter how hard you work to create valuable Facebook posts, no one will see them unless you pay for them to be boosted. Scary perspective, isn’t it? But this is where email marketing comes to save the day.

Email marketing, the safest way to your customers’ hearts

First of all, email marketing already is the most effective way to reach your audience. There are numerous statistics to prove it, so there’s no doubt about it: using email to send content to your subscribers is 138% more efficient than posting the same content in social media. For every dollar spent on email marketing, businesses receive a ROI of $44. No social media platform has managed to outperform email marketing, to this day, so our advice is: invest more in sending relevant newsletters to your audience than in buying engagement on Facebook.

There’s only one step you need to consider, though, before you intensify your email marketing campaigns: email verification. Finding a reliable software to clean your email list of spam traps, disposables, and other invalid emails is key to your success. ZeroBounce has very competitive prices and helps you boost your deliverability and, thus, your open and click-through rates, which will in turn drive more sales. Try our email validation system today and notice the difference!

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