Forrester sees Twitter and Facebook as a waste of money for brands

Social networks support customer loyalty – at least that was the general opinion to date. That fact that only a small number of followers see a post in their newsfeed at all may have occurred to a few social media managers, but no one drew any overarching conclusions from it. Does using Facebook, Twitter and co for band marketing actually make sense? Or is a social marketing channel an end in itself and don’t have any more defined aims? Future changes, such as a lower advertising frequency in Facebook’s news-streams will limited the reach even further.

The cost-use factor is sobering

According to a study by Forrestere, large brands only just reach 2 percent of their followers with a post on Facebook. Measured against the total number of followers, in the end 0.07 percent interact with a post. On Twitter, the number of interactions sinks to 0.03 percent. But brands should not just do away with all social media channels: After all, brands managed to interact with 4.21 percent of their followers with a post on Instagram. For example, Red Bull announced that they reached 2,600 like on Facebook and over 36,000 on Instagram.

Changes: Top and Flop

Brand marketers on Facebook should brace themselves for even harder times. The social network wants to lower the frequency of advertising posts in users’ news-streams. Changes to Twitter show the opposite: Tweets are supposed to be shown not only in followers’ streams, but to non-followers as well. Because Twitter is currently struggling with successful monetisation, this update could bring an upward trend for the trading listed company.

Use social media anyway

The solution for the reach problem could be to move social interaction onto your own website. For instance, brands could integrate the “pin-it” button into their page. One study also shows that people prefer to sign-up for a newsletter than to interact with Facebook posts. From this perspective, Facebook should no longer function as the centre of a social media strategy, but act as a complementary network.