Rethinking Social Media for Customer Communities.
In the age of Mass Media, before all of the Digital revolution, when businesses paid a premium to get their message to their customers. Businesses needed to buy space on billboards, radio stations, in newspapers and on television to have any hope of reaching the masses.
The high costs caused businesses to spend this money on advertising and the content produced was far from the 80% “free” value content and 20% promotional content that we know today. Businesses spoke and consumers,well, consumed. As we all know by now, while all these traditional media platforms were busy counting their money, Facebook created an alternative for Businesses, starting a conversation with your customer for free. Businesses jumped at the opportunity and as most of us know the rest is, as they say, history.
The Declining Organic Reach Problem
However, now that the power has shifted into the hands of social sites the 100% organic reach of the past (meaning everyone that liked your page, will see your post in their timeline/feed) has turned into a 6.4% figure in 2018 according to Hootsuite. If you want to increase your reach you have to do what you did in the past pay… As the organic reach for Facebook pages keeps dropping and Facebook groups looking likely to repeat the cycle of free at first, we have to start questioning if building communities for our customers on these platforms is the best strategy for our businesses?
What happens is Social Companies promote their newest features to you to encourage adoption and once they have achieved this, they now have your newly developed community in the palm of their hand. The choice is almost made for you pay or lose your community.
Control your Customer Communities
While these platforms are still and will for the foreseeable future be great to find new community members and reach new customers, using their powerful ad services, operating and maintaining a community on these platforms will be, and is already extremely difficult. It is also not to ridiculous to imagine Social Sites to start charging companies for just being active on their platforms. I can almost hear you thinking “That’s not fair” “They can’t do that”, well why not. You pay for TV ads, Radio etc. so why shouldn’t you be paying to actively promote your business on a social platform. These social companies are just selling their services like any other business and in many instances they are better. So, what is my proposed solution?
Well as we have established the social platforms are a great place to find potential community members and use their advertising platforms to extend our reach. This provides us with a great opportunity, that many businesses have already started implementing; Take control of your customer communities. What do I mean? Let me tell you….
When we reach new customers our goal should not be to provide them with a constant flow of content on the social sites (although this is still important), we should try to redirect this customer to our community that can be a Membership site or email newsletter. These communities where we control the “organic reach” of our content allows us to build and maintain valuable relationships. We can then facilitate valuable two-way conversations without a third party trying to profit from those conversations.
Yes, developing our own platform might be more effort in the short run but the indefinite control will without a doubt make it a worthy investment.
In Conclusion
Social Media is still a great way to reach new customers and finding them where they are, however, before long, I believe that business will have to pay to be active on these platforms. So, what is the solution? Well it is easy make use of the powerful tools the social media platforms provide to expand your reach and engage new community members, but encourage them to come join you on a platform that you own where two way conversations are not controlled by a third party looking to profit. Establish your own community where you and your customer can benefit and not a third party.
