Best place to hide a dead body in 2019

It was back in 2014 when this was a common joke*. Where to best hide a dead body – results page 2 of a Google search, a place nobody goes to. A large share of clicks on the search results page goes to the first links and within the first 5 results, pretty much all the clicks are accounted for. Nobody clicks through to page 2 of the search results and as much as 90% of pages on the internet never get any traffic from Google, according to research from ahrefs**. Did you ever go to page 2 of Google? If you did, I am pretty sure you were looking for your own page – I have done that many times as well when it surprisingly wasn't on page 1! But we write 2019 and here is the new question:

Have you ever been to a Facebook company page?

"What is a Facebook company page?", you may say.

That's the point.

I decided to run a little survey on Twitter. It is not scientific, it is not representative but it does look like it is confirming a hunch.

The Facebook company page having had more votes than Google page 2 does not mean, of course, that Google page 2 is a bad place to dump a corpse – simply, you now have more options. But why is a Facebook company pages all the way up there with Google?

A Facebook company page is a barren land

When you launch a company page you can invite your “friends” to like the page. And some of them will accept – out of the love and respect they have for you. And then you get taken by the hand by Facebook: start publishing some content, your story, add your opening times. And there you have it! Nothing happens... Things take time – we know that - and we need to be persistent so we keep publishing new content and still nothing happens. It is no secret that organic reach on Facebook – that means: the amount of people you are connected with or who are fan of your page who will actually see something you post – has been reduced to a strict minimum. Companies do a big job (and sometimes invest a lot of money) to get fans in the first place but when they publish something, those fans don’t see the content. Unless of course they boost their posts with advertising in which case the door magically opens. So please, can everybody just follow my company on Facebook? There is no risk, you won’t see anything we publish ??

More desolate places on the Internet

This article was actually not meant to be a rant in any way. We are celebrating a new leader. But maybe we forgot some contenders? Actually, in the course of running this little survey, I received several suggestions for lifeless places I could have added. Let’s have a look at them:

Twitter – just Twitter. When you’ve tweeted and nobody likes, retweets or clicks, you feel so terribly lonesome and I am sometimes so ashamed that I delete a tweet to not look so dumb. But to be fair, some people actually look (quickly) through their twitter feeds and since the algorithm change, the time decay is not so strong anymore. I don’t think they are contender here, I actually think they are a road to come-back.

Someone else suggested Google + now that is tricky. Google+ was closed down so it is pretty difficult to get there but if you already dumped something in there it may be very safe for now. I believe somebody scraped it all up and made it a searchable index (links in comments are welcome if you found this). But let’s face it, Google+ won’t be an option for you here.

How about company pages on LinkedIn? I have to admit that they are pretty well buried and also seem to have hardly any organic reach. Please follow Innovell on LinkedIn, I like to see that figure of number of followers but really, I am not sure the followers actually see the posts. But there is another reason why the LinkedIn company page may not be as isolated as the Facebook one – the page gets indexed in search engines and it is also linked from profiles that worked at a company. Not safe enough if you have something to hide.

I think you could possibly quite safely hide a dead body in a Youtube video – let’s say after 25 seconds when all viewers have dropped off. No risk of being indexed, not much risk of being found unless you link to it and write a transcript. Could be a good trick. 

The tipping point where organic reach is replaced by advertising

Every time a new service launches on the Internet, pretty much the same story repeats itself. Google wan Search, they concentrated tremendous amounts of user intention. Little by little they monetized an ever-increasing part of that attention with advertising. If you are in SEO you find this very frustrating but for end users, the frustration is mild as the balance has been well managed.

Facebook built its network via peer connections. You could see what your friends expressed, their photos, their stories and their actions. The network grew virally and once they had reached a dominating position they started monetizing that attention and reducing their investment in growth and the organic sharing of content. Again, for a community manager this is extremely frustrating but the general public has not had any major problem with this. Say "Facebook" and people's first reaction will be to think "Data protection" they won't think "Advertising overload".

The same story runs with Instagram and we are expecting Whatsapp to move in that direction next. Snapchat have not moved very far in that direction but in the end everybody goes there.

Getting the most out of organic

There will always be sites, pages and marketers who manage to reap benefits from organic visibility but there is rarely a lasting formula for this. Except maybe that of constantly trying and testing new things, new networks and services and figure out what works for you.

Keep calm and continue digging.

* https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chad-pollitt/the-best-place-to-hide-a-_b_5168714.html

** https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/

UPDATE MARCH 2019

During the #SearchLove conference in San Diego, Rand Fishkin presented a deck about emailing and how to get the best out of it. There was some intro talk about the appaling average of email opens and engagements so I decided to add the "email newsletter bottom". On a recommendation from the first survey, I also added "a tweet with no hashtags". Both of these got a fair number of votes from that small sample at the conference but something surprising happened: "Facebook company pages" got 0 votes. Not sure we really have a new king here. Going to have to do some more surveys ;-)