Social Business Strategy – The Law of the Squeezing Social Media Networks
What happened in 2014 in the field of digital marketing can best be compared with the Law of Bernoulli.
This law is very simple to understand: put your foot on a water hose and turn on the tap. What happens next, in my imagination, is a bubble of water that appears in the hose, just like in the Tom & Jerry cartoons from my childhood. On one side of the bubble, the pressure is higher. And on the other side, at the far end, only a little bit of water comes out. Take your foot of the water hose, and “voilà”, there is again plenty of water. Agreed, Bernoulli’s law is more complex than that, but this is supposed to be Bernoulli’s law “for dummies”.
In 2014, we’ve seen that Facebook started putting both feet firmly on our social media water hoses. Where we used to enjoy delicious free organic reach for our content, with “Facebook Zero” that organic reach came to a standstill. If we want to reach our Facebook friends as a brand, an hose them down with our updates, we’ll have to pay “please-get-your-foot-of-the-water-hose”-money to Facebook.
What is less known is that not only Facebook is doing this. Other titans like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn are taking steps in this direction.
Why do they do that? Obviously it comes down to money.
But it’s about more than just money … Read more
Social Business has now become Inevitable and Unavoidable
When Facebook ended the “free love era”, they drastically scaled back the organic reach of brands. It seemed for many marketers as if history repeated itself.
For a few years they enjoyed the exposure the network brought. But today, if you want exposure, you’ll need to pay to play. For brands on Facebook, these are dark days. They can choose to spend more money to reach fans they had already accumulated in the past, but Facebook will likely decrease branded reach even further.
It isn’t long before other large social media networks will do the same.
What are brands to do when social media networks are choosing to reduce the freedom that brands can play on their networks?
The evolution of Facebook – signaling the era of Social 3.0

According to a new report from Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 most-followed brands on Facebook has declined 40 percent year-over-year—even as brands have increased the amount of content they’re posting by 20.1 percent.
To understand a little bit on what’s happening, we need to go back a few years in the history of Facebook, and then look into the future of what is most probably going to happen. Read more
The Orchestrated “Like” : The Social Power of Your Organisation
It struck me. One of our best sales guys didn’t understand social networking. Yes he was on LinkedIn. Yes he was part of groups. And most probably also on Facebook.
But he didn’t understand the power of social networking.
He just didn’t get it what happens when he would “like” an update of the company he was working for.
But there is much more to understand how this sales guy, and the rest of the reach of your organisation, can have a massive resonating impact.
In this blog post I’ll show what a simple, orchestrated “like”, can do for your company.
How social marketing works
Fan or Follower Reach : For brands to resonate on social networks, the first step is literally to be seen. While brands have the opportunity to communicate directly with their Fans through the News Feed, not every brand message delivered results in an exposure to a follower or a fan.
Facebook uses an algorithm to help optimize the messages users see in their News Feed, and while the exact algorithm is not public information, it is clear that relevance plays a role in message visibility.
LinkedIn is probably using a similar algorithm, you can see this yourself when checking the updates on your companies LinkedIn page. You’ll notice that the number of “impressions” vary.
So brands in which consumers engage more regularly, whether through a comment, share, like, or check-in, have a greater likelihood of being seen on the News Feed, otherwise known as Fan Reach (or “cut-through”).
“Social media networking” : Don’t we have better things to do?
Many executives do not understand the power of social media networks.
And as such, your boss might be asking to you: why are you spending your time on “social networking” ? You should be plotting marketing strategies, and generate leads, and other stuff that marketers usually do.
If they ask you that question, just pop this counter-question :
How important is LinkedIn to your sales people?
He or she will probably respond that it is an important way of finding new business contacts, and information about companies and their occupation. And that for them it is a way to get in touch with people they want to meet. Or that its serves as a tool to track down occupations of people or companies to see if there is a link with business opportunities. Or that they are joining special interest groups on LinkedIn because that’s where people interact about trending topics, or even business opportunities.