Will Facebook Marketing Reach Saturation Point?

We used to see by using a daily Facebook advertising budget of USD 50, we can reach a targeted audience of at least 50,000 consumers through paid reach. (That was in early 2013).

Well, this may not be the case anymore.

Why That Happened

This phenomenon happened due to the change Facebook did that forces many companies to advertise for more audience reach when they reduced the organic reach out ability each company can achieve.

What it simply means is that if you have 100,000 facebook page likes today, each time your brand posted something on Facebook, perhaps only 6000 people or less will see that posts. According to an article in TIME magazine, a recent study found that companies’ consumers organic reach had dropped from 12% in October 2013 to merely 6% in February 2014. It also stated that it may further drop to 1 to 2% in the future. And that was an article in March 2014. So what now – 2015?

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Oversupply to Saturation Point

By adding sugar consistently to your hot cuppa coffee, it may reach a point whereby the sugar no longer dissolves in the coffee. This is what we called the “the saturation point”. Last year onward, more and more companies started to switch to Facebook advertising in order to reach out to their followers as well as new prospects. Will it mean that Facebook advertising is reaching its saturation point soon?

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The saturation point may mean that all your competitors are doing the same thing as you targeting to the same group of consumers using Facebook adverting. Will the saturation point also mean that paid reach has to be significantly reduced as well in order to accommodate such increase in the number advertisers. Well, I leave this for you to judge and decide.

Maybe It’s Time to Change Plans or Be more Creative?

When everyone is advertising to the same group of audience on Facebook it may result in information overload or what some experts called the “Facebook Fatigue”. Ads or sponsored posts that are not interesting or engaging enough would be chucked aside and ignored by the consumers.

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Since we know that paid reach may have decreased, we have to really think of the box when we advertised on Facebook. Especially when we are just small medium companies with small medium sized advertising budgets.

Here are 3 ideas to help you increase your ad reach on Facebook, other than the usual “pay more monies” strategy.

1. Make it Attention Grabbing

Do something that make your brand looks different from your competitors. Whether you have a attention grabbing ad title or a cool unique picture; something that will make people click, like and share what you have installed for them.

2. Change Ad on a Daily Basis

People attention level are low due to the overflow of information on Facebook. Your consumers will not likely click on that same Facebook advertisement again if you continue to show them the same advertisement consistently. Change your ad daily so that there is always something new for them to check it out.

3. Increase Social Media Retention

To make full use of your advertisement money on Facebook, you may need to find ways to increase social media retention. Hence, other than letting people like your page or posts, you can also lead some of them to your web content, where they can further share your content via other social networks like Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest or others.

Like it or not, to survive in this competitive game on Facebook advertising, you have to be more creative now if marketing money is an issue to you. Or perhaps, it is time to switch to other marketing strategies which are less saturated but as effective as Facebook?

Content Marketing and Branding on Facebook Has to Be Done Concurrently

If a new startup begins to advertise on Facebook, it may or may not see an immediate increase in terms of sales revenue or customers. This is because people need time to be familiarised with your brand. That is why it is important for your brand, to be consistently present where your potential customers are for at least 3 to 6 months. Just make sure you have the resources to maintain your brand presence to your targeted audience via Facebook advertising.

Consumers today feel better to buy from a brand they know rather than a company which they are not sure of. Hence, coupled to being consistently present on Facebook, your brand may also need to produce more customer related content for your consumers. In this way, your company will be seen as the thought leader in your industry, in which adds consumer confidence in your products and services thereafter.

In my objective point of view, it takes two hands to clap. Well, it is easy for some to say that Facebook had reduced organic post reach drastically in order to make more companies advertise with them. And that results in too many advertisers targeting the same consumer audience at the same time. I think it is also paramount for us now to be more creative in our Facebook ad content so as to get more from our advertising dollar.

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At the time of this writing, I am also looking for alternative platforms to help my business clients to reach out to more customers, since we already know that once things become too saturated, we have to change our plans. Though it may be too early for us to conclude that the oversaturation of advertisers may make the platform less effective in the future, it’ll be good to look for other alternatives as well. So, I’ll leave that for you to decide, cheers!

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