BBDO: Only 3 percent of big brands are boosting posts on Facebook

September 14, 2016: BBDO Worldwide recently teamed up with Socialbakers and Unmetric to analyze the degree to which the 100 top brands on Facebook were using the network’s paid promotional programs. These programs are increasingly important today because Facebook has so radically reduced organic reach in the past several years. For brands seeking to put their messaging in front of those on Facebook who have not already opted into their business page via a “Like” action, paid (“boosted”) posts are the only workaround to the issue.

97 percent of top brands opting out of boosted posts

BBDO found something extraordinary and unexpected: only 3 percent of brands analyzed used “boosted” posts to increase reach. The remainder completely relied on organic methods alone. In an article by Ilyse Liffreing covering this finding published on CampaignAsia.com, Julian Cole, head of BBDO’s Department of Communications Planning, noted that the all-organic strategy embraced by so many brands has the potential to crimp growth:

“When you look at where you actually grow,” Cole was quoted as saying, “it’s actually the light buyers, people who buy your product once or twice a year. So you think of Pepsi; it’s not the person who drinks like, three glasses a day. The person who drinks it once or twice a year is where you see your volume growth.”

Cole’s comments point to a basic misunderstanding about social media that appears to dominate the C-suite: the idea that “engagement” (measured by Likes, Shares, or other positive action by the user) are the most important metrics by which social campaigns should be judged. These “vanity metrics”

Furthermore, BBDO found that focusing narrowly on “engagement” can actually lead the brand down the wrong path, because those doing the engaging aren’t in one’s target audience at all.

Why pay?

Facebook’s organic reach reduction efforts haven’t been popular with agencies, brands, and publishers. Many observers feel that it’s cosmically unfair to ask brands (or their agencies) to pay all the costs associated with creating engaging social content, including ideation, graphics production, research, and copy creation, and then have to pay an additional “content carrying charge,” without which their content will only be seen by a tiny percentage of their fans and followers.

At the same time, however, it’s difficult to pity these brands, which collectively spend about $70 billion on television ads each year, and for which Facebook spending represents but a fragment of their annual media outlay. No one can say they weren’t warned; in fact, almost two years ago, Forrester’s Nate Elliot declared “the end of organic social marketing,” recommending that marketers needed to focus their efforts on branded communities and smart e-mail marketing as an alternative. If anyone’s to blame for the current situation, it’s the brands themselves, whose own naive assumption – that organic reach was always going to be free – ultimately led them astray into what journalist and Internet industry commentator Nicholas Carr has termed the “digital sharecropping” trap.

What is clear is that Facebook is – for those willing to pony up even a modest paid media budget – an amazing platform whose hyper-granular targeting capabilities keep getting better and better. Reaching the right user, at the right time, with the right message has never been easier, especially when marketers use Custom Audiences to leverage their own first-party data. Additionally, the consumer insights derivable from Facebook campaigns can have enormous value in their own right, and can be applied directly to other marketing channels, making them more effective.

Sadly, the brands who refuse to spend money on Facebook are doing themselves a disservice. While refusing to engage in paid programs might seem penny-wise, it’s certainly pound-foolish, and seems driven more by resentment and pique than by any realistic appraisal of today’s media environment, which is quickly evolving into a pay-to-play paradigm.

The only good news here is that it’s likely that brand managers who can resist the prevailing orthodoxy and convince the C-suite that social media budgets are now necessary to make any kind of splash on social media will  continue to enjoy a prevailing advantage on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (each of which has paid promotional programs in place to support marketers).