In 2014 I wrote an article titled “Why You Should Forget Facebook”
The main premise of the post was that Facebook was reducing its organic reach. In fact the numbers showed it was trending to zero.
So…. we dived into why using Facebook for organic and free traffic was becoming a waste time and you maybe need to forget it for earned attention.
It was rapidly becoming a pay to play platform.
The big promise that drew me to social media was that you could reach the world without paying the gatekeepers or begging for attention.
They were the media moguls and book publishers to name just two.
So I was disturbed and annoyed by this trend.
So where are we today?
We now have new gatekeepers.
They are the platforms and their algorithms. Facebook and Google.
The web is now run with code that strangles traffic and promotes what the platform sees as being in its interest.
Today the web has turned into a battle of the algorithms.
In looking my Google Analytics data, I compared the traffic from Twitter from 2 years ago to today.
Despite increasing Twitter followers in that time period the numbers are telling.
Twitter traffic has dropped by 53.77% and social by a total of 47.38%
There are essentially three things happening
- Fatigue – With any communication network there comes a time when it is less effective. Declining email open rates and social media engagement are great examples of this.
- More platforms. Instagram and SnapChat are the shiny new toys and some of the older ones are are being abandoned.
- New algorithms – Twitter and its cohorts have throttled organic traffic an endeavour to maximise revenue.
So the platforms push is still moving to pay to play.
Is all lost?
The short answer is no.
And sharing content on social is still important.
But today there is no big magic bullet. It is more an incremental journey of ongoing optimisation and experimentation.
A matter of degrees.
Continuing to optimise and invest in your website, having a multi-channel strategy and constant experimenting are all in the mix.
So….
Here are some of the things we are currently doing and experimenting with.
Investing in SEO
Last year we realised the website needed some investment. I had built traffic with blunt force trauma and had neglected the finer arts of SEO.
Looking after your primary digital asset is essential.
So we focused on two core things. These are the pillars of SEO.
- Technical – Fixed and optimised the technical aspects of the site to ensure that search engines loved us.
- Content – Optimised old and new content for search engines and also started creating “Pillar Content”
The results are telling. Organic search is up over 41% in just 12 months.
Growth hacking tactics
Despite our major project of optimising and investing in our search engine organic traffic growth we are trying a few other tactics.
Pushcrew is one, Flipboard is and the…
