There maybe a few businesses for whom going app-only makes sense, but they may be few and far between. For others, going app-only may be a necessity rather than a choice. For the vast majority of businesses, it will make perfect sense to use their web presence to connect with and enage with their audience.

Here are a couple of reasons why we make this recommendation:
a) Computer users are still a large number: this number may not be growing as fast, but a very high percentage of users still access the Internet and perform searches to find what they want through their computers. Why risk missing out on them?

b) Just building a mobile app doesn’t guarantee adoption: It is not enough to build a mobile app; it needs to be marketed just as hard and smartly to ensure that enough people download the app and then start using it. The magnitude of this challenge is much harder than many people think.

We recommend that a business should first start with a responsive web site so that it can cater to users who surf the Internet using both computer and mobile devices. Subsequently, if it makes sense for the business, opt for a mobile app.

In a nutshell, go mobile, but don’t go mobile-only. At least, not yet.

Image Source: ecumen.in

Small businesses that had gotten used to the company pages as an inexpensive means to reach out, engage and interact with their target audience are particularly aggrieved. To get a sense of the frustration, check out this interesting message to Facebook from one such affected marketer- a food delivery company (Eat24)- who announced an “emotional breakup” with the social media giant. Marketers using Facebook for their social media marketing are now confronted with some fundamental questions. Has all their past effort come to waste? Are they condemned to getting disengaged users and poor reach if they do not embrace any paid-for marketing on Facebook? What can they do- if at all- to continue to get some traction from their organic marketing efforts or should that effort be allocated elsewhere?

What the numbers say about Facebook’s declining organic reach

The drop in organic reach has been a subject of some concern since late 2012, though it is only in the recent past that it has assumed alarming proportions. This trend is akin to what organic search engine marketers (SEO professionals) are apparently experiencing—drop in organic search traffic and ever-more uncertainty about the potential traffic from this channel. A research conducted by Social@Ogilvy- one of the foremost digital consultancy organisations in the world- with an analysis of 106 country-level brand pages it has administrator access to found that the average reach of organic posts had almost halved from 12.05% in October 2013 to 6.15% in February 2014.

Image source: http://blog.bufferapp.com/

Since February 2014, we suspect that there has been a further drop in organic reach going both by the campaigns we track and various reports in the media. It is obvious that increasingly Facebook is cueing all business pages to be prepared for the day when their organic reach will be zilch. Marketers are hit by a double-strike from Facebook: the steep fall in post reach on the one-hand and growing competition for limited space for organic posts on the other. The writing on the wall (no pun intended) for Facebook marketers seems clear: shell out the moolah to get a slice of precious real estate on your target audience’s FB page or risk being unseen.

Facebook’s take

Not unsurprisingly- considering that it is a publicly-listed commercial organization dependent on advertising revenues- Facebook is focused on making

paid advertising/ promotions more effective and getting more marketers to use those options rather than relying on the ‘free-distribution’ channel. Their advice to marketers is to focus on the ultimate business results rather than trying to acquire fans, which is often the objective with most company fan pages.

“Advertisers should think of fans as a means to an end, not as the end in themselves. The end should be business results,” said Facebook spokesman, Brandon McCormick.

Are the paid advertising solutions effective?

What we can vouch for unequivocally is that advertising on FB has been made much simpler in the last couple of years to get more businesses to take out their credit cards.

However, the jury is still out on whether using Facebook advertising is effective in terms of driving business results (just what the FB spokesman wanted advertisers to focus on!). We’ve heard comments from cynics who call it ‘Farcebook for business’, while some others say that the precise targeting options offered by Facebook works for them.

Undoubtedly, Facebook advertising appears much more affordable than print and other forms of traditional marketing. What is less clear is the success that businesses enjoy from such advertising, gauging which remains a not-so-simple exercise. While e-commerce websites are striving to sell more of their products using FB’s advertising solutions, many of them have to be content with ‘exposure’ and brand awareness; conversions still seem to be a distant attainment.

Deciphering the Facebook organic feed algorithm: what marketers need to do

Even as marketers may be swimming against the tide, it makes sense to try and extract as much juice as possible from organic reach. To do so, they will need to think carefully, critically analyze the content they are creating and sharing and re-set their content strategy.

An infographic by PostRocket attempts to unlock the Facebook algorithm, which may give some essential pointers for marketers to formulate their content creation and distribution strategy on FB.

As a smart marketer, you should be well aware that the solution to the declining reach is not a click or two away. It will take a sustained effort to get any degree of success in expanding organic reach.

The “simple” mantra: focus on making posts relevant, useful and engaging

There is no magic bullet to address the problem of declining organic reach. As the above infographic shows, organic reach will be a function of a virtuous cycle: the more interactions that a particular piece of content gets from those it already reaches, greater is the likelihood of the content being shown to more people (aka, increase in organic reach).

The simple mantra for boosting organic reach of FB posts? Make your posts more relevant. Find out what posts engaged more fans. If you keep the content most relevant to your line of business, you have won half the battle.

Besides, time your posts right. Just as a scrumptious plate of hot lunch coming out of the kitchen would attract more interest at around 12 p.m. than at 4 p.m, interest and interaction from the audience to your content will vary with time. Determine the appropriateness of content for different time slots and you will get more interest that leads to more ‘likes’, comments and shares.

Lastly, request your fans to opt for your posts by adding your page through the setting tab. An example is shown below. However, ensure to put good-quality and relevant posts unless you want your fans to opt-out of following your page.

Here is another useful infographic [http://bit.ly/RuxKpl] that sums up the organic ways to thrive on Facebook, How are you dealing with overcoming the problem of organic reach? Got any other useful tips to share with the social media marketing community? Drop in your comments below!

- By Namita Ahuluwalia, content manager at On Target Marketing Solutions with inputs from Kathleen Murze; edited by Manoj Aravindakshan
 

This is based on several websites and Facebook campaigns that we have studied closely. Even when the number of ‘Likes’ increased manifold (over 300%) in a span of 2-3 months and the engagement levels in terms of Shares and Comments to each post also recorded similar jump, we did not see any significant improvement in organic search engine referrals. There was an obvious lack of correlation between the two. Yes, referrals from Facebook to the websites we looked did increase over a period of time, but these referrals continued to be a significantly smaller percentage of overall traffic to the websites.

What we see is consistent with Google’s statement that at this time the search engine aren’t using any social signals from Facebook or Twitter as relevancy factors for their organic search results. In fact, in the video below, Matt Cutts of Google implies that Facebook and Twitter signals are certainly not being used as influencers for ranking on Google.

However, this is not to say that such social presence may not be considered as ranking factors in future. It is likely that as Google develops better algorithms that are even less reliant on links as a relevancy factor, social signals will be important.

One of the big challenges for affiliate publishers is the increasing cost of traffic acquisition that they will have to contend with. For web publishers who already have large captive audiences, affiliate marketing offers a very good passive revenue stream. However, for publishers who are setting up solely with the idea of generating revenues from that channel, things may no longer be as easy as they were some time ago. Of course, if the publisher selects a niche that sells high-value products with high margins so that they can use paid advertising to bring in traffic, it may not be too bad. But if the primary traffic acquisition channel is going to be organic search traffic, then it may be quite some time before the affiliate site makes any good revenues.

In fact, Google made an announcement on January 27 that they are likely to penalise affiliate publishers who do not add much value on their websites. Read this to say that affiliate publishers can no longer get by publishing content from the merchant sites or posting product feeds from merchants; they will need to add value to that content if they expect to get organic traffic from Google. Obviously, this means significantly higher content creation efforts, which eats into the margins that one can expect to get from affiliate marketing.

To summarise: thoroughly evaluate the cost-benefit of traffic acquisition in the niche that you are evaluating to generate affiliate commissions. Affiliate marketing can still be a lucrative proposition in high value, decent volume niches.

The fact is that online reviews are not only extremely powerful in building (or destroying) the online reputation of an organisation but have shown to be quite influential in the buying decisions of those who read these reviews. Therefore, we recommend that if you take your online reputation management seriously, then take the following steps:

a) Acknowledge the reviews you get, good or bad, with humility and non-defensively
b) If a review is negative, promptly tell the reviewer that the issues raised are being looked into and that you will get back with an appropriate answer once the investigation into the matter is complete.
c) When you complete the investigation and a problem is identified, take steps to resolve the problem(s). Inform the reviewer of the specific actions taken. If there is anything that you can do to compensate the reviewer or make up for a bad experience, offer to do so.
Responding promptly to the negative reviews, acknowledging problems and communicating with the concerned parties sends out a very positive message to others reading the review that you care for your customers’ opinions, listen to their feedback and work to improve. Most customers tend to appreciate this willingness to improve and will be happy to give you the benefit of doubt.

Of course, there may be instances when the feedback you receive is indeed unfair or uncalled for. Instead of ignoring such comments, it is best to counter these with facts that must be stated non-defensively. Customers are often intelligent enough to see through the distinction between fact and fiction.

If the objective of the B2B campaign is  lead generation or business development, then Facebook (in its current form and with what it offers)  certainly isn’t a channel that the marketer should be expending too much resources on. On the other hand, if the objective is to create or spread awareness about the company and reinforce its position, culture, values etc., then Facebook is indeed a wonderful channel to be used smartly. After all, as some people have written in various forums, ‘businesses don’t make decisions, it’s people who do’ — and the people who can be influenced are on Facebook (even though their business personas may lie dormant for the most part on Facebook).

Another point to remember is changing demographics. As the Gen-I (Internet generation) becomes the major part of the workforce — and we are rapidly moving to that stage— there will be a major shift in the media consumption habits. The line separating social media for personal and business use is highly likely to be erased.

Overall, our recommendation is that if marketing is about being where the audience is, then be on Facebook too, even for B2B purposes. Moderate your expectations on what you will get out of it– or rather, use a different set of metrics to evaluate the success or value you derive from this.

Of course, with Google increasingly coming down on all kinds of links, the value of a link from a press release posted on a press release distribution/ press release directory site may be significantly lowered. However, the real value of a press release comes from other sources. For example, editors or bloggers may find the information useful and publish an edited version of the release on their own website (and may be even link to your website, depending on their own outbound linking policies). This is an editorially-earned link and assuming the site covering it is a good quality one, your website will certainly benefit from the link. Secondly, even if the site does not provide a link, the editorial coverage gives your business/ brand a huge boost.

We recently saw this with a start up e-commerce player in a rather niche segment in India who sent out a release using Business Wire India. The press release was picked up by a senior journalist with The Economic Times, one of India’s top business newspapers, who was doing a story on the niche market segment. The journalist contacted the founder of the start-up, interviewed him and included him in the feature that she wrote. The value of the editorial coverage: absolutely priceless!

Even though it is always useful to keep link acquisition in mind, consider the bigger picture. Remember, the ultimate objective is to increase online visibility for your brand/ business and towards that end, press releases are as effective as ever. Ensure there is a good story in your press release, which should be written well!

While it is reasonably logical to assume that B2B users may not carry out their vendor identification during the weekends, practical experience from numerous PPC campaigns we have run tells us that genuine business leads are generated during those days. And, we are talking about inquiries being sent by senior people from several large multinational corporations. Whether it is a case of the inquirer not being too concerned about rigidly separating work versus personal time or that they are just catching up on activities like vendor sourcing during ‘lighter’ days, there is merit in ensuring that your marketing messages are seen by the intended audience irrespective of the day of the week.

Of course, if your business is such that inquirers are contacting you for instant telephonic/ e-mail support and you are not geared to provide that, it makes sense to turn off your PPC campaign during weekends and holidays.

In a nutshell, we suggest that you create a PPC campaign to run on all days of the week, observe the trends in the clickthroughs, the absolute number of conversions and the cost per conversions of the campaign for at least 3 weeks and then taken an informed decision on restricting your campaign by the day of the week.

Hope this helps! If you have got additional questions related to planning and executing PPC campaigns, send in your questions to editor (at) netmarketer.in.

From a simple marketing experiment we conducted, we found that a Facebook page that was restricted by country to be shown in the US only was not indexed by Google. This page has been around for a long time, it is quite active with regular posts from the company and a ‘fan base’ of over 5000 people.

On the other hand, we found that other pages set up more recently, with lesser activity and fewer followers were not only indexed by Google, but also showed up on the first page of Google search results for brand name searches.

Therefore, we feel that you may be negatively affecting your marketing in two ways:
a) Your Facebook page not appearing in the search results means that you are opening up a slot on the first page to some other website that may be completely unrelated.

b) As there is supposedly greater weightage of social signals for ranking of your own website in organic search results, you may be hampering your SEO efforts by preventing your Facebook page from being indexed by Google.

To conclude, my recommendation is to apply Facebook’s country restriction feature for pages ONLY IF you absolutely have to prevent your page from being seen by others.

Answer provided by: Manoj Aravindakshan
Manoj Aravindakshan is an experienced online marketing consultant specialising in search engine marketing.