Page 18 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

Despite their well-conceived marketing effort, their organic reach on
Facebook (the number of people who see their content without advertising
support) had declined 90 percent in nine months!

How did this happen?
A few years ago, if you did a reasonably good job with your content and
engagement, you could expect that Facebook would “show” your post to about
30 percent of the people who follow you. Although this success rate varies a lot
by industry, organic reach has declined in a cataclysmic freefall since 2011 to
the point where it is near zero for most businesses, including my customer.
Why? Facebook’s explanation is that there is an excessive amount of content.
An average Facebook user can see nearly 2,000 stories in their daily newsfeed.
That is far too much to consume, so the company uses an algorithm called
EdgeRank to sharply edit what shows through to your customers.
For a small business that has depended on Facebook to connect with
customers—and there are a lot of them—there are seemingly only two choices:
1) Spend even more money on producing high-quality content, hoping it might
squeak through to a customer’s news feed, or 2) Pay Facebook to promote or
boost the post. Either way, competing at this new level comes with a cost.
But even this strategy of throwing money at the problem is backfiring for
many. As more people seek to buy a limited number of Facebook ads, the ad
prices are rising, pushing the price out of reach for many small businesses. And
even if you can afford to advertise, research shows3 that users are now blind to
sponsored, branded content on Facebook. Given the repetitive and typical
billboard-style/interruptive/insipient nature of the content it's not surprising.
And that is Content Shock in action.
This isn’t just a consumer goods problem or a Facebook problem. One study
concluded that between 60-70 percent of the content on a B2B company website
is unseen.4 The problem exists in every digital channel. Information density is
like a blacksmith’s hammer pounding down on our marketing programs, forging
new ideas and strategies and pummeling the old ways of doing business. It’s
time for something new.

Implications of information density

I believe there are other, less obvious implications of this trend.

1. Deep pockets have an advantage. As each new media channel emerges, it’s