Newer social media platforms such as Snapchat don't offer brand marketers free organic reach. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images
There seems to be a well-established narrative within the marketing industry that the early days of social media were a gold rush of free reach and easy viral content. Over the past year or so, however, platforms such as Facebook have decided to take this gold for themselves and force marketers back into having to paying to reach consumers.
You don’t have to look far to find the evidence of decreasing organic reach to support this. The verdict is simple: money hungry social media platforms have locked down this once-free tool and while we’ll still pay to use it, we’ll do so begrudgingly. Increasingly, I hear marketers looking to focus on new platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and others where they believe the golden days of free reach still exist.
The trouble is this story is built on a fundamental assumption that just happens to be wrong – the misconception that three to four years ago brands were freely reaching a meaningful number of consumers on these platforms. With few, if any exceptions, that simply isn’t true. Now that it’s 2015, it’s time to acknowledge that and move on.
Big brands deemed to be successful on social media at this time had hundreds of thousands, or in very rare cases millions of Facebook fans, and possibly just a few tens of thousands of followers on Twitter; but these very same brands would be looking to reach millions or tens of millions of people through the rest of their marketing. Even if 100% of this audience saw what they posted (something which clearly has never been the case) they were still reaching relatively insignificant numbers. When the most successful brand Tweets in the world are only getting tens of thousands of retweets it’s hard to argue that this core is really driving much scale beyond it either, especially for smaller brands.
This fact didn’t escape the industry and we created a whole new way of thinking about marketing to justify why such ultimately niche endeavours were worthwhile. We began talking far more about engagement, influence and loyalty. We discussed the fact that fans could be shown to buy more products and that therefore these users were more valuable to us, even though these same brands knew that the secret to their broader marketing success was in scale and reaching out to new consumers. Many industries, especially service ones, do continue to reap the benefits of this direct communication and customer service, but it is exactly that and arguably not pure advertising.
Today, the big platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have started to talk up their reach and media credentials. It’s easy to criticise them for simply wanting to soak up traditional media/TV dollars, but the reality is that for big brands this does make them a far more interesting and useful part of the media mix. It may be upsetting for brands not to be able to organically reach as many followers as they once did, but as paid promoted posts open the doors to more targeted reach there’s a far bigger opportunity opening than closing. In fact, rather than moving away from social media, big businesses such as Mondelēz are dramatically increasing their investments now that they can finally drive truly meaningful scale.
Rather than lamenting the decrease in free reach, brands should probably be asking if any of that organic activity was ever really worth it at all. Thankfully, the short answer here is that the return on investment was probably OK because in the grand scheme of things relatively small budgets were being invested, however much hype the activity was given. Much as social media marketing has been talked about over the past five years, you would struggle to find many big brands investing notable percentages of their total media budgets into it until quite recently.
Of course if it wasn’t just a devious plot to make more money why has organic reach decreased? The simplest answer is that there’s more content being put out there and people cannot hope to consume it all. Perhaps the platforms have hurried this along, though Facebook’s own statements suggest otherwise, but it’s an inevitable conclusion: brands must continue making better memorable content and paying to ensure people actually see it. Moving that content to newer platforms where you can reach a higher percentage of your followers is perhaps in itself a slightly foolish move. Basic maths shows us that a bigger chunk of a much smaller number is still a much smaller number, though there may of course be other reasons to look beyond the big social media platforms.
Jerry Daykin is the global digital director at Dentsu Aegis Network. You can follow his campaign for #DigitalSense in marketing on Twitter @jdaykin
