Organic vs Dark on Facebook
Recently, I’ve heard that some of my podcast listeners have been applying many of the recommendations I’ve offered and they have started seeing beneficial results. This couldn’t be more exciting, as starting a marketing project sometimes seems to be the most challenging part of the process, but I think once you start, you get into action and from that point on, everything improves progressively despite the ups and downs that you may encounter along the way.
A marketer’s Facebook Fan Page (also called a Business Page) is his real state. It is like his piece of land in the digital world in the Facebook universe where you can engage with people and find out what they’re up to. However, for the last several years, something has been happening with the Facebook algorithm, as I explained in a previous article. This algorithm is the way Facebook sorts and feeds people with news and ads and recently, Facebook has made it very difficult for any entrepreneur to reach those people that had earlier given their commitment by Liking their page.
This is because Facebook has recognized that they already won the battle against traditional media and in order to let you make the most out of it, they want your money. If you want your messages to reach wider audiences, you must be aware that pretending to grow your network organically is not the way in which experienced marketers now publicize their brands, products or services.
Let’s put an example on the table: If you have 100 followers, the number of people who would actually get to see your business posts is between 2 and 8 percent. That’s what is called organic growth. As the matter of fact, although having a large number of fans on Facebook is valuable because it creates a sense of interest to others looking to join your page, share your content, and yes, extending your network, you can’t expect to go beyond this framework, unless you make some profit for Facebook first.
This fact doesn’t change regardless of how many Likes your page has received. However, in some cases, when the content published on a page draws the attention of an extraordinary number of people, the marketer may reach up to 20 percent of his followers on the platform at no cost, but in order to give you with enough power to broadcast your messages as you please on Facebook, you have to use something that Facebook initially called the “Dark Post”, which was the original name that Facebook gave to advertising on their platform.
Why did they call it the Dark post? Well, because with this method you are able to find new people and get them interested in your product, behind closed curtains. My father, for example, has his own website called “Metabolismo TV” and we invest about $68,000 a month in advertising every month to reach new people.
However, you will not see a single ad posted on his own Facebook page. By advertising, we are actually doing a Facebook dark post and we do this through business.facebook.com, something that you should have set up already to start advertising in the Facebook newsfeed section of other people and gives you the potential to reach an entire city, a nation or the world itself.
With that being said, the only boundaries along the way are your own creativity and your budget’s capacity.
This will allow you to:
? Scale your business,
? Add more staff,
? Optimize your finances,
? Control your cash so you can invest more money on marketing
? Optimize your ad spend so you spend only what you need to spend?
How do you get the most return for your dollars, also known as ROI?
I’m going to give you something actionable now, something that you should put into play to better understand Facebook marketing on your own. If you come up with any questions throughout the process, you can send me a message on my Facebook page at m.me/manuelsuarez/digital
Here’s something more you can do to further educate yourself on how Facebook advertising works. I want you to go to your Google Chrome browser and look for an extension called Turbo Ad Finder and install it on your browser. This tool is going to allow you eliminate all the posts from your friends and family and show you exclusively promotions and advertisements. That way you will have the ability to see how other marketers communicate their message to their audiences. This is important if you want to know how to do a video, how to do an image ad, how to do a carrousel ad, how to promote an article, etc.
Turbo ad finder is going to give you ideas on how to distribute your message, whether you want to promote your own existing store or you want to start an e-commerce store. As soon as you find an advertisement that interests you, click on the button that shows up at the top right corner and prompts a drop-down menu that comes with an option that says “Why am I seeing this ad?”. Click it and study what targeting that brand or service is using in order to locate you, so you can understand how marketers are distributing their messages to find you.
If you’re not branding yourselves, you’re not planting your roots and you’re not taking advantage of a precious moment in time that will be remembered 20 years from now as the greatest advertisement era in history. This is not an exaggeration, if I had a time machine, I would go back to 2001 and invest every single penny on Google AdWords Marketing, which now has become excessively expensive. Today we have the same opportunity with Facebook and Instagram and Messenger marketing, which is incredibly affordable right now. This is the greatest opportunity today to learn how to use it and take advantage of of this underpriced advertising platform.
There’s no such thing as a degree in marketing that’s going to carry you for the rest of your life. You have to continuously be learning and adjusting updating your advertising techniques.
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