In the last week, several announcements have been made that change the landscape for many small business owners who wish to advertise through social media. The first comes indirectly from Facebook; the other is from #2 social media site, Google Plus.
FACEBOOK
The first announcement was actually a shift in stance at Facebook that was noticed and published in a recent article on Advertising Age’s website. Facebook is shifting. They want to make the posts that appear when users log in to be useful, interesting, and relevant. As more marketers jump on Facebook, that means more attempts to get a user’s attention from brands, and therefore the number of times one of your business posts will show up in the timelines of your followers will decrease over time because otherwise everyone’s timeline will be covered with business-page posts rather than your cousin’s wedding or best friend’s baby pictures. Last year, I saw statistics that on average, 15% of a page’s followers would see any given post. Now they’re expecting that to drop into the mid-single digits as they try to make the timeline more relevant to users. That means if you manage to get 1000 followers, perhaps 40 of your subscribers might see what you post.
The solution, according to Facebook, is to pay them more money. They argue that the reason you should pay them for more followers is twofold: first, 4% of a large number of followers is more people than 4% of a smaller number; also, it makes the ads you run more effective by increasing the connectivity and breadth of your audience. Once you’ve built that audience, you should pay them again to increase the percentage of people who see it back to what they’ve already been offering.
Of course, critics of this change (this article being only one example) point out that if a brand is posting irrelevant things, a user can just revoke their Like and the problem is solved--no need to change the algorithm. And that it’s hardly fair to charge a small business to get more followers, and then charge them again to talk to the followers they paid to get, particularly when the restriction on who gets to see the post is an artificial one.
It seems to me that Facebook is becoming less and less small-business friendly. If you’re a famous national or international brand, you’ve got the budget to do this. For a small startup or family-owned shop, it just doesn’t seem worth it. Why not invest in building an email newsletter list instead? Then you get to contact 100% of your "followers" any time you want. For free. For businesses that can do well with short text posts, Twitter can also be done for free without restricting the audience. The value of Facebook as a small business marketing tool seems to be eroding fast in comparison to other social media outlets.
GOOGLE PLUS
The news out of Google is that they’re changing policies, too. Previously, there were no display ads permitted on Google+ and you couldn’t pay them to change how your content was displayed. Soon, that will change. There will still be no display ads on Google+ but they will soon be launching “+Posts” which seem like they will be sort of like promoted posts, only with a twist: when you promote a post, they will be displayed not on G+ itself, but throughout Google’s online ad network.
What will that look like? Well, judging from the video about the upcoming feature it seems that your G+ post will show up instead of ads in places around the web as a whole, with all its interactivity intact. Knowing how important relevance is for Google, I’m assuming it will show up in places where there are content matches. Reading a blog post about chocolate? There, instead of an ad along the side, is an embedded G+ post from Cadbury. And it appears you’d be able to comment, +1, share, join a Hangout, instead of just clicking on the ad to be taken to the target page. In other words, it blurs the line between “advertising” and “social media.”
Since building an audience on G+ is still free, and that building authority around a topic there helps you to rise to the top of Google search results, and soon those posts can also be promoted through Google’s ad network if you choose to pay, it seems like these changes are making Google Plus a far more appealing place than Facebook for a small business owner trying to grow their business.
