Last week, Facebook made the announcement that starting in January, it will limit how many promotional posts people see on business pages. This is on top of two algorithm changes, and theorganic reach has dropped to 2.71 percent. In the last year, entrepreneurs have felt the impact of these changes in many ways, the biggest being their ability to reach their audience.
Most of the large social media companies are now publicly traded, which means they are focused on generating profits more than ever before. For the entrepreneur, this means to reach your audience, you will have to pay to do so.
The changes in social media mirror those that happened in SEO a few years ago. There were entrepreneurs that built entire businesses on SEO, and after two Google algorithm changes, many of those businesses were wiped out. History is repeating itself with social media.
Related: 4 Tactics for Surviving Facebook’s Algorithm Changes (Infographic)
Smart entrepreneurs can weather this storm by not making social media their main marketing strategy. Here are three reasons why.
1. The organic reach will continue to decrease
As these companies continue to report their earnings, the pressure to increase profits will force them to charge for services that have been free. Organic reach may never reach zero, but it will continue to get close. There are ways to increase engagement, but if a smaller base initially sees your posts, this will become nearly impossible to do without paying to boost your posts.
For small business owners, this is not good news. The biggest problem is that paying for social media ads doesn’t always translate into income, and there has been some convincing evidencequestioning the effectiveness of these ads. This doesn’t mean we should abandon social media, but we have to be smart about where we spend our time and money.
Related: Why Your Facebook Page Is Becoming Less Relevant
Why relying solely on social media marketing is a losing strategy
