How social (media savvy) are you?

By Leticia Mandrigal | Social Media Specialist
@lettycandoit

Social media in today’s society appears to be driving everything from business exposure, personal branding, and basically everything around us. It has even become a job position. Yes, it has become a job; all of those brands that you see posting very clever content and catchlines know what they are doing and have large teams working to brainstorm to create such content.

Most social media accounts are intended for personal use, to share and engage with friends, family, and even celebrities! But more importantly, social media has become one of the largest platforms for business marketing, if you do it right.

Pages on Facebook and Instagram, prior to a couple of months ago, used to work in the exact same way as personal accounts. Content in one’s feed was presented to us in a “new to old” algorithm. Today, Pages, especially those of smaller businesses are not getting much exposure due to changes in algorithms.

About six to eight months ago, Facebook, who owns Instagram, announced that the algorithms were changing to “show you what really matters” every time you wake up. Depending on who you are you might spend all night on social media, or only a couple hours on your lunch break or after work and school.

Many individuals tend to spend at least 4-8 hours without checking their news feed. Within those hours Facebook and Instagram is gathering the content posted and determining what they think is important for you to see when you finally pick up your phone.

The “what is important for you to see” has become subjective to these factors: how often you engage with the Page (like, share, comment on posts), how much engagement these posts are getting around the world, and how recently it was posted.

This is why you often find yourself seeing older content at the top of your feed with thousands of likes, comments and shares.

Due to this change the organic reach for Pages has decreased tremendously. Forcing these page users to pay for ads.

This appears to be an easy transition for huge brands that have large marketing budgets.

But what are your local small businesses and nonprofits doing to fight for exposure?

It has become a challenge for small businesses and nonprofits to reach their audience. It is no longer as simple as assuming that the 1,000 people that like your Page will see everything you post.

Instead, about 10 percent of your audience will be reached organically. Requiring Pages to pay per post in order to reach a larger number of people.

Though paying to “Boost” a post isn’t the only way of increasing the number of audience reached per post, it the most obvious and easiest route to take.

The bigger challenge that those who don’t have a budget to “boost” every post face is having to create content that is even more engaging, liked and shared.