Can we please stop talking about organic reach on social media? #DigitalSense

Ask a room of 100 marketers what impact social media algorithms have on their pages & their ability to reach consumers and at least 99 of them will tell you it's something bad. They may not understand exactly how or why but they know algorithms are the enemy in an ongoing battle to be seen. Awkwardly, at least 99 of those marketers would be wrong.

What's that? You thought they were a tax put on your page so that Facebook & co can make money every time you want to speak to your fans right? In reality they're a logical inevitability, the only practical way of managing a situation in which more content has been shared than users can consume. Get this: Facebook's algorithm actually ensures content from Pages is seen 'organically' MORE often than if it was just freely mixed in with all the other updates out there. The algorithm helps you, it’s just still a tiny opportunity.

Want someone to blame for lower reach? Blame Apple for popularising smartphones and making it easy to overshare; or blame Buzzfeed for reinventing journalism in the shape of viral videos that now fill your timeline; or blame all the other marketers for churning out their endless updates too. Social media algorithms are not the enemy, they're ultimately the only thing that keeps an audience active & engaged so there's anyone you can hope to reach at all. That’s why both Twitter & Instagram have ended up introducing one, despite user wariness it ultimately makes those platforms better & stickier.

Yet just about every single day I see another article on how you can beat the game and squeeze a tiny extra bit of organic reach out the system. The latest genius? A proposal that liking your own posts will create that little extra bit of engagement to encourage Facebook to show your post more widely, never mind the fact you'll look desperate to anyone who does then see it.

There are so many websites & gurus offering tips to improve your organic reach that it's approaching the point where marketers should consider a class action lawsuit against them all for wasting their time and effort. Unfortunately the opposite has happened and it's become a widely accepted and embraced truism. We're all conning ourselves in the false hope of free media, and then a bitterness that somehow that's been taken away.

Thing is, whilst you're battling to increase your organic reach from 1% to 1.5% of your small fan base, if you were serious about growing your business through social you'd probably need to be reaching at least 1,000%, in most cases far more. In fact speaking regularly with the most dedicated people who already buy into your brand is about the worse possible use of resource in a world where a long tail of light buyers really define big brands.

It's not that this pursuit is a harmless distraction either. Beating the feed almost invariably comes back to tricks to drive (or should I say force?) more engagement. Of course more engagement is a good thing right? Well maybe in some abstract sense, but in reality forcing engagement tends to take marketers down a horrible route of pointless questions, or games/tricks to prompt users to engage.

Sure these work for a small in-crowd of clicky people, but you're left communicating almost nothing positive about your brand and in fact again probably coming off rather desperate to any wider audience who does see you. You appear to slightly more people, but communicate almost nothing worthwhile to them. Another shocking fact: engagement rates simply do not correlate with real world brand & business impact. They are a measure of how clicky content is, not how much of an impact it has on people.

Focus on content that delivers on those business metrics, and if you don't have the scale/resource to measure that at least focus on content which positively communicates the messages you want to get out there and COULD theoretically have an impact, rather than that hides behind a gimmick to get empty attention.

As for the reach & scale you need? These environments have been pay to play from the very beginning, and we're lying to ourselves when we say otherwise. Whether your budget is $10 or $10m dollars a bit of paid media instantly transforms the reach and in turn impact of your campaign. In as much as earned media does exist on social the vast majority is on top of a base of paid spend, even publishers like Buzzfeed sponsor some of their own posts to get the ball rolling.

What if you have literally no money to support it? Then you're probably wasting your time being on social at all, just as you wouldn't bother making a TV ad if you weren't going to buy any air time for it. However many people say you 'have' to be on social these days it's really not true, except perhaps in some specific customer service cases.

No one will miss you if you're not there or not posting, which in fact means you can also feel free to post far less regularly; in fact only post when you do indeed have money to promote it. Yes there are arguments for testing out content amongst fans before pushing out more widely, but if the engagement you get doesn't link to business results exactly how are you going to identify success before boosting it anyway? Getting off the treadmill of daily/hourly updates and allowing yourself time & resources to make content you'd actually want a big audience to see is a straight forward win - for big advertisers don't fool yourself that a few adaptations to a 30 second TV ad truly work for what is in reality often a 2 second format.

Facebook & for the most part Twitter have long since debunked the value of organic presences on their platforms - sure they have money to make from that case but also a huge amount of evidence & rationale. Whilst the seemingly unstoppable social media marketing train chugs along Facebook reps can't even say the words 'fan' or 'engagement' without choking. They've long since positioned themselves as a powerful reach driving media channel, to be measured in line with real business metrics.

Spoiler alert - most big advertisers have at their hearts long since embraced this approach too, but it's the individual marketers and smaller businesses exposed to a constant torrent of social media tips I fear for. Of course these social media activists are lining up the usual series of exceptions to disprove my point as we speak (or more depressingly probably ignoring it and hoping it goes away). 

What about Apple?! Well they're more famous for not doing social at all for years, though I guess arguably relying on a different form of 3rd party organic reach. When they wanted to use it as a serious marketing channel and move beyond their core super fans they absolutely put their money where their mouth is.

What about Tesla then! They're recently on record proudly saying they don't spend a $... and indeed they too do well amongst a dedicated tech core. If ever they can make enough cars not to have a waiting list I suspect they'll start looking further afield too.

Oreo then, that Dunk in the Dark tweet was something else right? Having worked for/with them this one is easy to debunk... Oreo reaches far more people on an average day of promoted social posts than ever saw that one off special Tweet. You may remember Mark Ritson got the full wrath of the social media marketing community when he questioned this at the time.

Yes there are some real pieces of content that do go viral; a lot of them have 'bought' that by featuring celebs, influencers or other expensive gimmicks. Some do just get lucky... but a few exceptions do not a great strategy make, and those exceptions would have been even more powerful with some proper backing. We used to just call this sort of thing ‘PR’.

The next time someone gives you a tip on boosting engagement & organic reach don't thank them, send me their names for my future law suit – I honestly cannot believe I’m writing a post like this for about the 5th year running. Honestly there are FAR more interesting things to debate... like viewability questions, content optimisation, whether personalisation works, the list goes on...

I am a marketer who helps global brands make sense of media in a digital world; Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. These #DigitalSense posts are my attempt to cut through the hype that surrounds the industry. I have led media, digital, social & partnership strategy on both client & agency side, and am a passionate speaker and industry contributor.