How can you take control of Facebook?

Why do Facebook want to control your customer relationships? 

Like most restaurants and venues, you probably have a Facebook page for your business.

If you do, that’s great, however, do you really know how to use Facebook to generate customers, bookings and relationships?

We run the Facebook pages of dozens of restaurants and other businesses, so we have a good benchmark of how they work and what works on each page.

Does Facebook work for restaurants?

If I said ‘No’ would you be surprised?

Fuunnily enough the answer is not ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, it’s ‘Maybe’. The reason is, that it usually depends whether you are paying Facebook for advertising.

When Facebook Pages first launched in 2007, we were running them back then too. If we gained a follower for a client at that point and then shared a status update on their page, many of those followers would see those posts.

As Facebook developed their paid advertising platform, back in 2008/9, they began restricting the number of people they showed your posts to.

Here is how it has changed since 2012.

Feb 2012 = 16%
Sep 2013 = 12.60%
Nov 2013 = 10.15%
Dec 2013 = 7.83%
Mar 2014 = 6.51%

Yep – believe it or not by March 2014, if you shared a post or status update on Facebook, on average only 6.51% of your followers would see it.

So how many people see our Facebook posts now?

Believe it or not, it is somewhere between 1 and 2%!!

If you have 1,000 followers on your Facebook page, just 10 and 20 people will see it on average.

How can you increase that number? 

There are two ways to increase the engagement on Facebook:-

Option 1. Analyse the results from every post you make, in terms of the content, image, timing, audience, reach, engagement results and other data and then use that information to work out which types of content will produce higher engagement. This needs to be reassessed on an ongoing basis.

Option 2. Pay Facebook to promote every post.

What happens if I don’t do one of the above?

It won’t work.

You have to remember that Facebook now owns and controls the engagement between you and your customers, so they can do what they like and more importantly charge what they like!

If you are paying currently, you may have noticed the costs have doubled in the last 12 months. That is going to continue.

For all those people who are posting on Facebook every day, simply look at the statistics and you will soon see what we mean.

For most restaurants, if you aren’t paying Facebook to promote them, you may as well stop posting, as no-one is seeing your posts.

How do we work with our clients?

We are experts in Option 1, however we actually use social networks like Facebook to develop other ways to communicate!

Ways, YOU CAN control.

To find out more about that, you will need to talk to us.

Don’t take our word for it though, one of our clients can tell you far better.

Next steps

If you want to grow your business call us on 01772 978 199 and we can have a chat.