Much has been written about the end of the free lunch for brands on social media. It has gotten harder and harder to get the organically driven results that were once our crown jewels. Why is that happening, and what does it mean for marketers? Let’s break it down.
Paid versus Organic: The Pendulum Swing of Social
The social networks need to keep users engaged, and make money in the process. So they aren’t just charging for advertising; they are actually forcing brands to pay to get their content in or at the top of user feeds at all. This pay gate for brands is designed to keep the feeds on social networks relatively light on brand content, which helps keep users from jumping ship. It also allows the networks to charge premium rates.
Facebook is the best known such example, but all the networks are following suit. The recent Instagram announcement explaining their switch to an algorithmic feed is a step in that direction as well.
So now, only world-beating organic brand content —if any at all — is destined for the top of the news feed. To get impressions and engagement, brands must pay up. This puts even more pressure on marketers. Why? Because underperforming organic content has major opportunity costs. But underperforming sponsored content takes the hard cost of the advertising spend down the drain with it. That’s the difference between organic and paid content that flops: one is sadly ineffective, the other is just plain reckless.
Introducing Facebook Paid Content Detection for TrackMaven Customers
To rise above wasteful and ineffective content plays, marketers have to be more confident than ever in our content decisions. And that means we need insight based on data, not our guts. We cannot be left guessing if the engagement of competitor and influencer content is buoyed by paid promotion (or not). Because when left in the dark about paid versus organic content, it is far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions about the topics and campaigns to put our limited resources behind.
That’s why we’re launching Facebook Paid Content Detection in TrackMaven. Starting today, customers can see which content is promoted and which is not on Facebook — for their own content, and for the content of their competitors, influencers, and any brand or individual they are monitoring in the TrackMaven platform. TrackMaven uses a detection model to predict whether a post is promoted or not by analyzing its performance over time against a validated data set. Rest assured, a brand’s data remains private and anonymized.
TrackMaven customers can filter their views of competitor content to include, or exclude, promoted content, and compare the performance of promoted content versus non-promoted content:
Promoted content will be designated with a dollar sign icon. For example, when we promoted our Social Media Inflation infographic on Facebook, we saw three times our average impact score as a result:
There are many ways to use TrackMaven’s Facebook Paid Content Detection feature:
- Distinguish between content that is promoted and content that is not in your competitive landscape
- Identify the most engaging organic content topics (for your own brand, as well as for competitors and influencers) that are the best candidates for paid promotion.
- Understand how much content your competitors are promoting on Facebook.
If you are a TrackMaven customer, talk to your account manager about getting access to Facebook Paid Content Detection. If you aren’t a customer, now is the time to take a look. Request a demo and we’ll use TrackMaven to perform a review of your content and your competitor’s content, free of charge.