If you came to me in 2012 and asked if using Facebook was an essential part of your blogosphere, I would have said, “absolutely.”
Today, things are a little bit different. Leveraging traffic from Facebook users is much harder as the social network attempts to keep its users on the platform.
The Newsfeed algorithm has changed significantly over the years.
In fact, it’s changed so much so that only 0.6% of my traffic comes from Facebook.
From a business standpoint, this strategy makes perfect sense. Facebook has a user base of more than one billion users — they need to capitalize on them to the best of their ability.
And let me stress — these are my opinions. Maybe your blog is still crushing it with traffic from Facebook. If so, congratulations. In my experience, using Facebook for blog traffic, as of late, is a big waste of time.
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The Decline of Organic Reach on Facebook
Look, I get why you’d want to be on Facebook. Ahrefs has the social media giant listed ranked #1 with an incredible domain rating of 100. Saying Facebook has a large reach would be an understatement.
And despite being the most populated website on the internet, increasing traffic to your blog with Facebook is very difficult in 2020.
Long ago, in the wild west era of Facebook, you were able to reach your entire audience without spending money.
During this period, it was possible to get tons of social traffic from Facebook with relative ease.
Jim Harmer from Income School talks about his first website, Improve Photography, relying on traffic from his Facebook page initially.
If someone liked your business page and you posted content, it was likely that they would see it in their feed.
Boosting Content
Today, Facebook emphasizes spending money to reach your audience — even if they like your page already. In 2014, the social network rolled out a feature called Boost Post.
Boosted posts are sort of like mini ads. They typically don’t cost much and help your content reach a higher percentage of your audience. By default, the boosted post only hits your page audience, but you can broaden it with a regular ad.
I’ve noticed that posting content that links to my website in a Facebook post leads to little engagement and almost no visibility.
Despite my Facebook page having more than 3,000 fans, I have to spend money to get this type of content seen.
Many people in online forums suggest putting the link in the top comment spot, but I assume the CTR (click-through-rate) would be abysmal.
Content Without External Links Works
However, content that doesn’t link to an external URL is acceptable to Facebook. My audience sees these posts and engages. I suspect it’s because I’m keeping them on the platform, rather than sending them to an external website.
Memes are viral in this regard and work very well for my page. Despite good engagement numbers from me posting content like this, I can’t say it’s worth much.
For all the work and time I’ve put into Facebook, I’ve only gotten 2,931 sessions since 2016 referred from the social giant.
Compared to the total number, 474,193 since 2016, it’s just a drop in the bucket of my overall traffic coming in at a measly 0.618% of my total traffic.
Even though I do not see much traffic from my page, and I likely haven’t seen an increase in my Amazon affiliate earnings from Facebook, I continue posting content on my fan page. Social signals are necessary, despite being a buzzword in the SEO community. I figure it can’t hurt.
I’ve never sat down and looks at these numbers until writing this post, but it makes me want to all my efforts on Facebook altogether.
My Experience Boosting Posts
It hasn’t been a good one.
Whenever I’ve boosted content for my band or something for my niche site, I’ve always felt it’s been a total waste.
At least in my case, for affiliate marketing with a niche website, don’t waste your time with boosting Facebook posts. Visitors prompted with a review, or roundup list will not convert to sales. The traffic is too cold.
I haven’t seen a significant increase in traffic or engagement, but maybe I’m doing it wrong. Creating manual ads within Facebook’s ad manager always has reaped better results.
What I Recommend: Set up a Facebook page and post your content when you get a chance. Don’t worry about making your Facebook page a priority, but do share your content there.
I often like to grab a section of the article and use that in quotes for the post content above the link to the full article.
But at the end of the day, I think spending your time writing more content is much more valuable than wasting the day on Facebook scheduling posts. Especially for 0.6% of overall traffic.
