What Facebook Zero Means for Healthcare Marketers
As you may have heard, organic reach of content on Facebook brand pages may very well reach zero. A recent white paper by social@Ogilvy documents the steady decline of organic reach from about 16 percent in 2012 down to 2-6 percent in February 2014. The paper indicates that “Facebook sources were unofficially advising community managers to expect it to approach zero.”
If you’ve invested in creating a robust liker base for your hospital’s Facebook page, you may be thinking, “What now?” And if you’re just getting started with marketing providers and services via Facebook, you may be thinking, “Why bother?”
Take heart. One very important aspect of Facebook has not changed: there is still real value in having fans share your content, interact with your brand and make recommendations. These actions still fuel trust and build loyalty. The difference? You will likely have to pay to get content in front of fans so that they’ll have the opportunity to engage.
The Ogilvy piece explains that “Facebook has always been an oddity in the ‘paid, owned, earned’ model.” Brands had been considering Facebook posts as an “owned” channel they could use to amplify content resulting in “earned” media. “Going forward,” says Ogilvy, “[brands] will need to use ‘paid’ to fuel ‘earned,’ but that doesn’t make the earned any less valuable.”
So the emphasis remains on producing good content and prompting engagement from fans. You’re going to want to make sure content is well-written, visually interesting and extremely shareable – in other words, it needs to be high quality. And you’re going to have to nurture the community on your Facebook page like never before. In addition, paid promotion of content will be needed to push brand content into the newsfeeds of targeted users (both likers and non-likers). And there’s good news there: Facebook has some impressive tools and options for reaching any number of relevant audiences.
Perhaps you’ve never done paid Facebook advertising. It’s not surprising. After all, until a few months ago, many brand pages were getting by with organic reach. Where do you start? Right here! We have a couple of resources for you: “Getting Started with Facebook Paid Advertising” and “Getting Started: Custom Audience Feature.”
“Getting Started with Facebook Paid Advertising” is an overview of the opportunities available through Facebook for targeting consumers based on specific marketing objectives, like website traffic and conversion. It highlights three stages: targeting, monitoring and analyzing. “Getting Started: Custom Audience Feature” shows how brands can target Facebook users utilizing company data (consumer email addresses, for example). Both tip sheets are available as free PDFs here.
The bottom line is you’re going to need to take a close look at how “Facebook Zero” affects your social strategy. It’s likely the changes at Facebook will impact not only how you use that platform but also how you utilize the unique attributes of other social networks, like Twitter and Instagram. Want help getting navigating all of it? Drop us a line!
