The Cambridge Analytica Facebook Scandal And Brands’ SEO Efforts

With last week’s revelation of a major Facebook ‘data breach’ involving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, brands across the globe are now reconsidering their advertising spending on the world’s largest social media platform. Though the breach was reportedly about user profile mining, marketers are equally worried, as it means millions of users concerned about the safety of their online data may choose to delete their Facebook profiles. This reduces the target market for brands who thrive on user engagement marketing through social media. According to news reports, big brands such as Mozilla, Sonos and Commerzbank have already decided to decrease or pause ad spend on Facebook.

What Does This Mean for Marketers Who Still Want to Sustain Their Reach on Facebook?

With Facebook announcing the news feed update that limits content from brands and include more updates from friends and family, it is time to think about how brands can use user engagement metrics and word of mouth marketing efforts to get placed on news feeds from personal networks.

The best way for brands to achieve this is to focus on building engaging content marketing strategies and becoming great content marketers, and eliminate push sell strategies on social media. Developing effective influencer relationships on Facebook and getting them to recommend and link your brand to their posts is another great way to earn organic visibility on Facebook. Whatever ways brands choose to engage with their audience on social media, there could be no better time than right now to use social media marketing efforts on Facebook and remain consistent, irrespective of paid marketing fluctuations.

Other benefits of social media  such as getting cited about your brand from websites who talk about you positively can go a long way in building a positive social media presence. Using keyword research tools and staying up to date on current social media trends can help you find relevant content that has great search volume. Use this information to create rich data full of audio-visual content and text-overlay videos that have the ability to go viral.

How can brands still reach users with their paid marketing efforts?

A good way to plan advertising spend on Facebook would be to look at your actual marketing objective and only focus on assigning your ad budget to that objective. You can do this through running dark posts through the Facebook Ad Manager or Power Editor that give you multiple campaign types, bidding options and formats, and also give you marketing objectives to choose from, such as views, traffic, conversions or awareness.

It’s also not a good idea anymore to be wasting your ad dollars on the ‘boost post’ option, as it does not really lead to any conversions or sales, it just increases visibility and post engagement. It may be wiser to think about using that budget on search and content network marketing channels such as Google AdWords. With targeted paid search marketing, you could be reaching your users and engaging with them across the web, and making them convert for you well.

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