Facebook is the big daddy of social networks. As of the first quarter of 2018, Facebook had 1.44 billion monthly active users. If you aren’t aware of the power of Facebook by now, you either spent the last decade on the moon or deep underground. But hey, welcome back!
Why use Facebook to build your brand?
Facebook helped break the dawn of social media marketing, allowing brands to target their advertising toward specific interest groups, as well as measure the engagement from marketing e fforts. The platform is by and far the easiest way to access the most amount of people, with no cost to create an account, and the ability for brands to begin posting immediately.
In recent years, however, Facebook has introduced options for monetizing pages, and this has directly aff ected the appeal of the platform to many brands. As of 2018, Facebook announced it will penalize brands posting promotions by limiting their organic reach, operating under the assumption that users want to see “more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.”
A study by Locowise in March of 2018 found that average organic reach was only 2.60% of a total audience, which amounts to approximately 1 in 40 fans of a page seeing a promotional post. What’s more is that the largest brands saw the smallest reach.
What’s unfortunate about this is that although you have invested both time and money into creating great content (sometimes referred to in the Facebook world as Thumbstoppers), Facebook is keeping you from getting it to the people who want to see it. We already know that 75% of engagement on Facebook occurs within the first 5 hours, and 75% of your reach occurs in the first 1 hour and 50 minutes. But once that time is up, the likelihood of fans seeing that content is incredibly low.
When you o ffer a promotion, advertise an event, or announce something important, the decreased e ffectiveness of Facebook can make it seem all for naught.
Strengthen both channels by leveraging Facebook in email
Rather than cutting your losses and calling it quits, repurpose Facebook posts via AVARI social blocks in your email to help maximize your time and your users’ engagement. With a hypothetical email open rate of 15%, that’s probably more exposure than the organic reach on your Facebook page.
And even if you were capable of reaching more followers on your page, what’s interesting is that ExactTarget’s report on The Meaning of Like found that “39% of Facebook users who ‘Like’ at least one brand say that marketers should never interpret their ‘Like’ as permission to post marketing messages that would appear in their News Feed.” So even with increased reach, you might still risk turning off a percentage of your fans.
Embedding a real-time Facebook feed in your email allows you to market directly in subscriber inboxes, the place where your community expects promotional material. It also helps you to bypass the dilemma of static subject matter, providing recipients with fresh, relevant, up-to-the-minute content.
Inspiration: Facebook feeds in email
Use Case 1: The “Where Can I Go Out Tonight”
You host events twice a week and you always post about them on Facebook to spread the word among your audience. There is always some uptake, but your email list is larger than your Facebook following.
You want to get your email list excited about the event but the problem is, if you send an email today and some subscribers open that email tomorrow, they may have missed today’s event. You don't want to disappoint them either.
Include a call to action saying “Come to our next event.” Then insert a dynamic Facebook block in your email campaigns that always brings up the most relevant and current event postings, so that even if an event has passed, the next one appears in its place.
Use Case 2: The “Ultimate Fundraiser”
You're organizing a fundraising campaign, and it’s a 30-day push. People are out in the streets raising money, Kickstarter is running, and you’re holding events to promote the campaign. Alongside this, you and your team are constantly updating your Facebook with what’s happening in the moment. But your emails always include old content referencing things that happened a few days or a week before.
Add an AVARI Facebook block to your email template. As you post your Kickstarter updates, pictures from your street team, or an invite for tonight’s black tie ball, your audience sees the latest news and can react to what’s happening right now in your quest for donations. This makes your email content fresh and relevant right now, and not old news that happened last week.
Use Case 3: The “Daily Deal”
You are an online retailer advertising a di fferent promotion every day, but you don’t want to appear spammy and email everyone on your list every day. However, you still want to publish your daily o ffer and have it seen by as many people as possible.
Add a dynamic Facebook block to your email templates, and post your daily off er on Facebook, but send your emails three times a week. This way, you will keep your email list members happier and prevent too many unsubscribes. You’ll also know that no matter what day your customers open their email, they’ll see that day’s off er.
Get more for your Facebook investment via email
Facebook is still a great place to connect with your community, despite the changes that the network has made which hurt the visibility of brands. Use email with live Facebook feeds to capitalize on your investment in social while bringing across the more easily accessible audience on your email channel.
