Business

Social Media Roundup: Facebook’s Destined to Break Your Heart

Facebook appears headed for a major correction in the way it does organic social reach, and that may be a rude awakening for your association. Also: a reminder that sometimes the simplest forms of engagement just work.

You won’t like this.

You’ve invested time, energy, and maybe even some cash into your Facebook page, and it feels like all you’re getting are diminishing returns. What gives? Well, we’ll lay it out for you in today’s Social Media Roundup:

Party’s Over

Want to feel good about your Facebook strategy? Don’t click this link. Behind that URL, Ogilvy’s Marshall Manson points out the ongoing decline of Facebook’s organic social reach, which he suggests is a zero-sum game, complete with a depressing chart. But Slate‘s Will Oremus, jumping off a saltily worded post by ValleyWag‘s Sam Biddle, suggests something else might be at play here—the simple idea that people would rather hear from their friends than brands, and Facebook is adjusting accordingly. “It’s understandable that businesses feel cheated: They’ve spent years doing everything in their power to get people to like their pages, only to see their engagement dry up when Facebook changed things around,” Oremus writes. “But maybe the lesson for marketers is simpler than it seems: Facebook likes are only as valuable as the actual sentiment behind them.” (ht @BearAnalytics)

Asking is a Strategy

Sometimes, the obvious things just work. That’s how Association HQ’s Jessica Keenan Smith puts a recent situation with one of her company’s newest clients, the American Neurological Association. The strategy the firm undertook to boost up the association’s renewal rates was actually pretty modest—back in November, the company started emailing renewal reminders to members to remind them to do so. It was a low-impact engagement strategy, but it worked. “[S]imply by engaging our membership through a fairly low impact and low cost manner, we were able to increase the renewal rate before the New Year by more than 1000 percent,” she noted. Think there’s a lesson you could take to your own staff in here? (ht @AssociationHQ)

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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