Overcoming the Now Limited Reach of Facebook Business Pages

If you rely on traffic from your Facebook business page, you’ve likely noticed a drop in traffic from that source.  Why, you might ask?  Sadly, part of Facebook’s plan to bolster the monetization of its billions of users involves now charging you just to get your content in front of your OWN fans.  Yes, only a small portion of your very own fans who have “liked” your page even see your posts anymore.  Some reports even show that the amount of your fans that see your posts automatically is down to just 5% – 10%.  The worst part is that some companies have invested thousands of dollars to build up their Facebook following only to have that taken away from them… unless you want to pay.  What a total bait and switch, right?

Your Options
At this point, we all need to play by Facebook’s rules so you really have two main options:  You can 1) Do what Facebook is pushing you to do which is pay large amounts of money for “promoted posts” just to put your content in front of your own following, or 2) you can get clever and still leverage Facebook for exposure but start pointing users to other capture points which you have 100% control over.

For a 100% captive audience that’s all your own, email marketing is now king again.  The key, however, is using Facebook and other platforms to drive more users to give up their email so you can push content to them later.  The best place to start is looking into your favorite email marketing platform (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc) and check to see if they offer an easy Facebook page integrator tool or “app”.  Many of the big email marketing platforms like MailChimp offer this feature for free as an add-on.  This connector enables you to add a tab on your Facebook fan page that allows users to subscribe to your email list right on your Facebook page.  Another way to promote your email signup right on your Facebook page is to post about it and associate the call-to-action with some sort of giveaway.  Example:  “Click here to receive instant access to our free whitepaper” (which the user then clicks and has to enter their email address in order to receive the free gift).

Conclusion
Many of you may be implementing some of these strategies already but for others this may be new.  The bottom line is email marketing is really coming back into style as the primary outreach driver since Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social platforms are increasingly squeezing small business owners for ad cash.  If you only take one piece of advise away from this article, do this:   Use every clever strategy you can think of to get your prospects’ email addresses (in a non-pushy way, of course) in an effort to always be building a huge, money-making email list that will always be your captive audience.