Facebook Changes Disrupt Social Media Roi For Online Marketers.

As the CEO of a web development company that manages our client's online presence

, in the past year we have seen a trend where companies are willing to have a Facebook Fan Page as their only online marketing activity. This not only reflects Facebook's position in the social media front, but also a deep misunderstanding of the deep conflict of interest between these organizations and Facebook.

Lets start with the facts. Over the past few years Facebook has made a lot of changes, a lot of them are targeted towards reducing what Facebook would call the facebook user's information over load and thus the effectiveness of viral and social media marketing of businesses using Facebook as a way to reach and engage clients and audiences.

One of the first such artificial changes was when they stopped Facebook groups with a user base of more than 5,000 from being able to send messages to their group subscribers. Facebook was punishing the successful groups. One of our clients at the time was the major soccer team in Egypt, and suddenly they lost the one thing that was important to them in marketing their online presence. In essence they used their heavily trafficked web site to entice people to join the Facebook group thus increasing the value of Facebook to their soccer fans. Without the ability to send messages to fans the group had degenerated into a forum, which they already had one their site.

The Ying-Yang like relationship between Facebook and the brands that promote their products through Facebook has become weaker and trust is a key factor here. Here we have real world organizations that have the loyalty of people, push these people to interact with them online through Facebook, thus adding value to Facebook and making it harder for any competing social platform to compete with it, and at the same time Facebook is reducing the ROI of these partners one by one and methodically over time.

Another example is when Facebook altered the rules of what it shows on user's walls in such a way that you only see updates of people, Fan Pages and Groups you interacted with recently. Many Facebook Fan Page owners saw their posts getting about half as much and up to a third as many views. Even when users shared content from such Facebook Fan Pages, only a percentage of their friends would see this shared content. This lowered the viral ability of content on Facebook by a great deal. So an organization that was willing to spend 10,000$ on creating a viral video for its Facebook Fan Page now is getting a third as many of its intended audience. The result is that most companies will reduce their spending on Facebook or they will stop altogether.

To top it off, Facebook announced on September 30th 2011, that Facebook totally removed the ability for owners of Facebook Fan Pages to send messages to fans of the page. Many of Facebook Fan Page owners had used this feature to inform users of upcoming products or promotions. This was a killer feature for most and was lost. Facebook did not post a reason for this change but on their blog they wrote telling people about alternatives to this feature as shown below as a consolation or to me just rubbin salt into open wounds.

1-Post content on your page Wall so people see your updates in their news feed. You can target your posts by location or language.

2-Consider using targeted Facebook Ads or Sponsored Stories to help grow and highlight your message within the Facebook experience.

Alternative 1 as we showed earlier had already been massacred by Facebook in a previous change. The really interesting bit is alternative 2. This is where you start to get a feeling for why Facebook has been doing the things outlined above. They are telling you to use paid ads as a replacement of a feature that you had for free when you started to use Facebook as a social media marketing platform. This suggests that they want to monetize your Facebook fans, that you spent time, effort and money to bring and engage online on their web site. Now you not only need to spend money to advertise your fan page, but you also need to spend money to communicate effectively to your entire fan base that you already paid for.

With time more and more marketing professionals will understand this as they measure falling ROI on their Facebook social media campaigns. For myself I just remind my customers of the proverb that says, He who puts effort in raising children that are not his, is planting seeds in a farm that is not his own. As long as you do not own the tool that your social media campaigns are built upon you will not be able to reap the benefits of your efforts in full.

by: Ehab heikal

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