Brace yourself for the worst reach you will ever have on Facebook

For a while now, we have argued about the danger of building your empire inside a leased land, that is, building your brand’s reputation inside one social network. In this kind of environment, your brand is completely susceptible to the decisions of a company over which you have no control. Not buying it? Just picture what would have happened to your empire had it been built upon Orkut! Well, in case you haven’t listened before and had trusted uncle Mark with building all your digital strategy on Facebook, a major drop in your posts’ reach might be on its way.

Facebook is going to globally launch a new add-on on its system: the “Explore Feed”. Generally, the Explore Feed is just a way for you to find out new content from pages and people that you still don’t like/follow. However, in 5 countries (Slovakia, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Comboja) a new technique is in trial phase.

In these countries, the idea of Explore Feed is to segment your News Feed into two separate tabs. Your friend’s posts + ads will go in your current feed. Whereas in explore feed, you are going to have all posts from the pages you follow.

Yes. You heard it right: if you don’t pay, your page’s posts will not show up in your follower’s News Feed.

As a consequence of that, acting brands in these countries have experienced a dramatic drop in their posts organic reach. In Slovakia, the 60 biggest brands on Facebook have seen a fall in their interactions (comments, likes, shares) down to 50% since the launch of the add-on.

Interactions on the 60 biggest media pages in Slovakia since Facebook started the test phase

Adam News, Head of Facebook’s News Feed, guarantee they don’t have plans to launch the functionality globally.  Facebook for executing tests constantly and simultaneously in different countries – this practice relies on C-levels and programmers who have autonomy to do the same without the need for a permit, as long as they follow some basic rules. In any way, the core message is the same: create your own marketing channel: one that can survive and thrive regardless of other parties.

In your site and your blog, you have absolute control over everything that happens – layout, CTAs, contents, information display and everything else. This gives you independence from the external factors. Generating leads through e-mail addresses and contacting them via this channel are much more independent ways: they are not expected to go anywhere and are also not subject to one companies decisions.  These channels, thus, are still your go-to, trusted communication and client interaction source!

Yes, use social networks!  However, use them wisely. Use them to lead traffic to your blog or website and keep these channels as spaces of interaction between you and your visitors, leads, and prospects.

Found in: Guardian, BBC, Vanity Fair, The Next Web, Mashable, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Recode, Business Insider, Reuters, The Times, Independent, Quartz, Filip Struhárik