Is it time for a Facebook Pages newsletter?

Over the course of the past two years Facebook's popularity in terms of social media advertising has rampantly grown, both with marketers and with clients. The trend of getting on the Facebook bandwagon has affected everyone and its seems as though it has become a 'must have' for literally any company out there, whether it's a small gift shop or a large size corporation. There's only one problem - the number of fans, which for most businesses' management is the driving force of motivation, means nothing anymore, unless you cough up that money.

I'm not even going to go into details about the Facebook algorithm because there are more than enough articles on the web written on the subject. Briefly, we all know that usually you get around 6-8% reach on posts but that it all depends on how many of your fans are online, how crowded their newsfeed is with posts from other pages they follow and numerous other issues. In plain English, it doesn't matter how big your page is, because the reach is horrible, and there is nothing more defeating than to see a page with 30-40k likes that has post reach of 500 people.

The even more defeating thing is the fact that Facebook essentially wants you to pour money into its system for you to get basic results that in the past you would have gotten just by working on the quality of your posts, and on engaging with your community. I don't know about you other marketers out there, but I see a trend on increase of prices of advertising and of lowering of quality of results. Yes, Facebook has become a big and "mean" moneysucking corporation as we've all feared it would and there seems that there is no stopping it.

On the other hand, the much older ways of online marketing have continued to work for most companies out there. Email marketing is still as strong as ever, but the rules of different browsers, email clients and email sending services have grown considerably complicated. It's not just about crafting the visually perfect newsletter anymore, but about paying attention to all the html rules of what's allowed and what's not.

Tired yet? I know I am. The conclusion is that you are placed in a difficult position as a marketer. On the one hand, you want to help your client, while on the other, you waste way too much of your/his time and money to follow all the rules and less on the actual creative, social and goal-oriented process.

Solution? A Facebook Pages newsletter! Sounds cool and logical doesn't it? Well, it does to me at least. You have built up a huge and legitimate fan base, you send those fans a one-time message whether they like to subscribe to your Facebook Pages newsletter, the frequency and type of newsletter they would like to receive and you're done! Let's separate the posts from the sales and advertising and let's allow the pages to focus on communicating with their clients in a socially fun way through posts and communicate their information, products and services through a newsletter right there on Facebook. What are your thoughts?

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