Why Should You Sponsor Your Posts on Facebook?

One of the frequently asked questions is why a company should invest in promoting their posts on Facebook.

A quick answer is provided by a recent article from Hootsuite: by the end of 2020, the average organic reach of a single post dropped to 5.2%, compared to 5.5% in 2019 and 7.7% the previous year.

Organic reach is the number of unique individuals who have seen your Facebook page’s post without paid promotion. The data thus shows that fewer and fewer followers are seeing our content organically, and they have fewer opportunities to like, comment, or share.

Let’s explore together what brought about this change on the platform.

From the Origins of Facebook to Today

Since its inception in 2004, Facebook has changed its appearance and functions several times. Every year, increasing numbers of people started using the platform to share moments of their lives and comment on others’ content. Currently, to provide a comprehensible estimate, over 1 in 3 people worldwide are registered on Facebook, and there are over 30 billion new pieces of content every month.

The use of this social network by businesses has also rapidly evolved. Having a Facebook page is no longer exclusive to large brands: nowadays, we might even find the page of our trusted local fruit vendor. It is estimated that there are more than 80 million small businesses worldwide registered as pages on Facebook.

Having a Facebook page is equivalent to saying “I exist as a business“. Moreover, it is a free and mobile-friendly service that allows reaching communities of users who might be interested in our products and/or services but are not yet familiar with us. It’s also a way to simplify customer care, thanks to the ability to chat with users, share information, or solve their problems.

More and More Content on Facebook

With these numbers in mind, it’s easy to imagine that the amount of content created and shared on Facebook has exponentially increased in recent years.

If all the content published by pages and contacts were visible in our feed simultaneously, it would be impossible to see them all. Competition has increased, and for each post, it becomes increasingly difficult to gain visibility in the News Feed.

For this reason, Facebook has changed its algorithm over time to give greater attention to the most relevant content for its users, gradually decreasing the organic (non-paid) reach of posts, even for large brands.

Facebook’s Algorithm

This increased attention translates into the functioning of Facebook’s algorithm.

The mathematical function evaluates each post based on various parameters, including the frequency of interaction with pages and users, and decides to show first those that should be most relevant to us.

The goal of the algorithm and the platform is to make our experience as enjoyable as possible: if we only saw unpleasant content, Facebook would not be the social platform we know today.

Furthermore, with our behaviors and habits on Facebook, we instruct the algorithm every day, which increasingly understands our desires and interests.

The videos we watch, the posts we comment on, and the cat photos we heart indicate to Facebook what interests us; Facebook will then make sure to propose these contents to us in the future to keep us happy and active on its social platform.

Why Use Facebook Ads

If the News Feed is designed to show the most relevant content to the individual, it’s easy to imagine that priority goes to posts shared by friends and connections.

To prevent your promotional content from being classified as ‘undesired’, it’s necessary to create user groups (audiences) to whom our posts could be interesting and not annoying.

For these reasons (and also because Facebook is not a nonprofit organization but a publicly traded company), the blue social network becomes a much more effective tool if businesses decide to use paid advertising to achieve their goals.

However, let’s remember that “in medio stat virtus” (virtue lies in the middle): starting to sporadically promote posts from our page with €5 won’t yield many results and will prove a wasteful expenditure of time and money.

Using Facebook Ads is not just about promoting posts, but also about defining an editorial plan of interesting and diverse content and a sponsorship strategy that considers the customer journey of our users and that our ads should cater to multiple objectives.