You Don’t Actually Own Your Social Media Followers

You know all those followers on social media you worked so hard for over the years? Yeah those aren’t actually yours.

At least not in the way you might think. Facebook for example limits how many people can view your posts. Especially if you post content that doesn’t get good engagement.

Around 2012-2014 Facebook reduced the amount of organic traffic a business accounts could receive to only 12-16% of organic views compared to previous years. They did this for a few reasons.

1. The most obvious was to “encourage” brands to pay for visibility to their captive audience.
2. But they also limit the amount of content people can see if your account isn’t getting engagement. That’s a red flag that you’re not providing a good content experience for their users.

Today it’s thought that only about 4-6% of posts on business accounts can actually be viewed organically by your own audiences (unless you start paying for ads). That’s one of the reasons engagement sucks on Facebook.

But What Does That Mean?

That means roughly 94% on Facebook will never ever see your FB posts. So stop worrying about how many people follow you and start worrying how to convert traffic from social media to your website to convert your next lead and customer.

Now, before anyone complains about the Facebook algorithm, you have to remember that all our accounts were free. When something is free, we are the product.

These are advertising platforms, so the goal is converting people off social media into your sales funnel (not building your likes, followers, and engagement.

Then What’s the Point of This Article?

All of which is to say, don’t build your audience on rented land. Build your list not just your social account.

You don’t have to worry about picking the right social media account to be active on. Just focus on how to convert your audience to your site where you can capture the contact info of the audience you want to sell to.

Do that by creating a valuable resource your audience can consume (see below download call to action).

If you don’t have a defined strategy of collecting information to convert a follower to a lead or opportunity, then you don’t really have a marketing plan.