Why Facebook restrict your post reach

Friday 6 March 2015

Has Social Media taken Marketeers on a 360 degree journey?

Has Social Media taken Marketeers on a 360 degree journey?



Recently I am reading more articles about how search engines are getting better, smarter and delivering increasingly relevant results.  I have been reading articles like this for 15 years (that's pretty much when Google came onto my radar), lately these articles have made for more exciting reading with the emergence of automated Image Recognition, BIG DATA (see what I did there with the font) and new techniques for fast searches of these huge amounts of data.

Big Data in a nut shell - the Social Media giants and the Search Engine major players have been collecting data about us, lots of data.  Data from ... everywhere.  The usual suspects are 
browsers and web sites, but they are also getting data from our spending, credit cards, loyalty cards, mobile devices, our cars, our phones, tv's - even our central heating thermostats (google own Nest) soon our fridge will re-order eggs from Ocado (or Tesco's, Asda etc) arrange a convenient delivery date and time and post a note in our diary - because it can.

But its not just the Big Data that I am reading about - what triggered the thoughts in this blog was an article discussing the Automated Image Recognition technology being developed allowing the search engines to extract contextual information from still photographs and video.   So now a photograph can be automatically analysed to determine its actual context / content regardless of how we label it - if its a picture of a cat, its a picture of a cat.  

Basically, the decision on what is relevant content for an audience is now squarely with the Search Engines and Social platforms, no matter what key words you use, now they decide - queue an algorithm update from Google.

Bringing this all together, 'they' have huge amounts of data on us, combined with clever, fast, pattern matching search algorithms = extremely accurate search results, based on what we are interested in matched to what the content is actually about.  Organic results from Organic searches on honest Organic data.

So our social proof is going to be increasingly important as only interesting content will be delivered to interested people.  Its not just the search engines that are doing this - the Social Media platforms like Facebook are filtering who see's our posts.  I have blogged on how Facebook are doing this, you can find that article HERE
Social Media "More than just posting on walls"

So, there's where I come to my idea that Marketeers have gone on a 360 degree journey.  The art of Keywords, SEO, meta tags, the 'art' of optimising web sites, blogs and content to convince search engines to rank your material higher is increasingly being trumped by the simple actual relevance of the content to the target audience.  And now that relevance includes search engines and platforms interpreting the meanings in a picture or video for themselves.


Welcome back traditional marketing skills of understanding a target audience, creating and sourcing appropriate content and placing this where it will get seen.  That its now online is academic, the web is completely transparent.


Any one want to buy a Crystal Ball, one careful owner? 

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