Apple Made 'Organic Reach' Decline, Not Facebook #DigitalSense

Marketers can obsess a little over the declining 'organic' reach of their social content and a certain blue network gets a lot of the blame... But what if I told you it was actually Apple's fault not Facebook's, or more specificallly the result of the rise of the smartphone?

Facebook recently made the surprising (and under reported) claim that their newsfeed algorithm ends up showing more of a brand page's content than would show up in a real time feed. That's because even on unfiltered platforms like Twitter only a small percentage of followers see anything you post: the percentage that happen to be online before so many other things are posted that it dissappears off the bottom.

Sure 5% reach may sound like a low number limited by a money making business, but remember there are 1500-15000 posts that every user can see when they log in... without an algorithm you'd be lucky to be seen at all! Your post actually represents less than 0.1% of the content for even the most averagely active user, far less for some. Facebook's algorithm is showing you to 500 times that many people... So what is it that's truly limiting your reach?

I suspect the answer may be in your hand right now (unless you're holding a mouse/trackpad). Mobile phones have made it exponentially easier for people to post updates, photos especially, and the end result is a drastic increase in the amount of content out there. 3 or 4 years ago you were still returning from holiday, connecting your digital camera to a computer and posting an album of snaps. Now you might be sharing a couple every day, whilst checking in a few other places, live on wifi you found on the beach. Brands are posting more too, with the majority now active on social media and many looking to say something every single day... The end result is an unbelievable increase in the amount of content out there.

Of course we also consume more - in fact by some estimations we more than double the amount of time spent on Facebook when we start using it on our phones! Even that leap however is nothing compared to the content boom I've just described. You're spending twice as much time on social platforms but there's probably at least 10 times more content being posted... The result is inescapable: every piece of content will be organically seen by fewer people. It's a fact that holds true across every digital and social platform out there, and it's one marketers simply need to get used to because the amount of content being produced is still increasing exponentially. In contrast there are more people than ever using these platforms, and better media tools to promote content to them, so with the right paid strategy social channels are conversely a far bigger marketing opportunity than they've ever been before.

So there you have it. It's a nice, easy narrative that Facebook hide our posts on purpose to force us to buy advertising and make more money (and yes, they have tweaked their algorithm along the way which supports engaging content but hides a lot of unwanted marketing rubbish), but the bigger reason why our posts have such competition is that Apple kicked off the smartphone revolution. Please address your future complaints to: Tim Cook, One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California

PS - As I've said many a time before though, this whole argument actually shouldn't matter to big brand marketers. Being able to pay to reach a large targeted audience is MUCH more valuable and exciting than being able to work hard to reach a small one.

I'm a digital evangelist but also a realist - #DigitalSense is my attempt to cut through the hype that too often surrounds the industry. I hope to help marketers like myself make sense of digital and brands transform their media approaches to drive business results.