Meta's shift to pay to play and the silent death of organic reach

Summary

quick question, how much are you spending on social media right now in your business. if the answer is zero, why. there’s a shift happening on Instagram that’s worth paying attention to.

1. remember Facebook pages. they used to be the engine. fans, posts, organic reach, real distribution. then almost overnight, it stopped working. some big names publicly deleted their pages and their businesses didn’t blink. Facebook went pay to play.

2. organic will never be profitable for a social media company. one more time. they can’t monetize people scrolling for free. they have to monetize through ads. so eventually every platform shifts. it’s not malicious, it’s the business model.

3. Instagram is following the same playbook. multiple founder friends who built their entire businesses on Instagram are telling me DMs aren’t working, posts aren’t reaching, reels aren’t performing. the shift is here. people will hand you yesterday’s rules, post consistently, make good content, but those rules don’t win the current game by themselves.

4. don’t run direct call-to-action ads as your primary play. agencies will impress you for one to three months and then dwindle. instead, go synergistic. post quality organic content, then boost the ones that perform with a small budget. $50, $500, $1,000 a month, whatever you can sustain. keep it on. don’t turn it off.

5. cost only goes up. every advertising platform follows the same arc. free, then organic dies, then cheap paid, then expensive paid, then most people get priced out. we’re at the cheap paid stage on Instagram. that’s the moment to get good at it.

the only signal you need that it’s working is leads and customers go up when ads are on and down when they’re off. that’s the test. try harder.

Transcript

remember facebook pages

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Quick question for you is how much are you spending on social media right now in your business daily, weekly, monthly? And if that’s zero, why? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon.

And today I want to start with a little story about Facebook. So some of you may not have been around long enough to remember. But there once upon a time, there was this thing called a Facebook page. Now they still technically exist, but they don’t exist how they used to. And a Facebook page, a business page was how you got reach.

So you would write, and I say us, we, this is something I use. We would write blog posts, we would post them to the Facebook page. We would get likes, shares, comments. It was very, Facebook pages were very active. And then there’d be a counter, right? There’d be like, how many likes do you have on your page?

And that was a very big deal, much like Instagram followers or whatever else. And it was an amazing platform. And I know our company, back in the day, spent a lot of time there, like optimizing it and doing all the things that we needed to grow the Facebook page. And then eventually it just stopped.

It stopped working. It wasn’t as effective. And there were some pretty big names in the industry at the time that were like, we’re deleting our Facebook page. And they did. They publicly deleted it. And then they saw no change in their business. And it was just a, it was a huge transition because Facebook was more up and coming.

They had these Facebook pages, these business pages, and they’re really helpful for businesses to grow organically. Get our message out there. It was a great place to get information out, everything. But then just one day, almost overnight, it changed. And today, I don’t even know if we still post anything on there.

organic is never profitable for the platform

It’s not something I really follow. They’ve changed a lot. But what actually happened was Facebook became a pay to play platform. And something that you need to know is that organic reach will never be profitable for a social media company. One more time. Organic will never be profitable for a social media company.

Because they don’t, you can’t monetize people just hopping on Facebook and getting a million fans on the, on your Facebook page, and it costs you nothing, right? Like, they need to monetize their platform. They do that through advertising. And now that’s what’s been happening to Instagram. I tried calling this many years ago, but I was way off on timing.

I thought it was gonna happen three years ago. And I thought what was gonna happen to Instagram was the exact same thing that happened to Facebook pages. I thought eventually Instagram would become this pay to play platform, meaning you have to advertise, you have to put money behind content, those kind of things.

But again, I was a couple years off. But it looks like it is actually happening. It’s happening right now. I think we’re at the very start of this. I don’t know how bad it will get. But what you’ll see is, and it looks like they’re following the same playbook, is they let Instagram do what Instagram did.

And that was people get on the platform, now you have these influencers with massive followings. Anybody can do it. You got a lot of like people teaching how to do it, like you got the mommy bloggers telling you what to wear, what to eat, how to think, all that kind of stuff. You got every person who’s even had made at least five bucks on the internet telling you how to run an online business, all these kind of things.

They’re getting massive followings and they were able to get those followings pretty easily because organic was easier. But now organic is becoming hard. And it’s like the people who have those massive followings, they might get capped out or maybe they’ll allow them to continue to grow. So other people can look at them and be like, oh, no, I guess it’s still possible I can do it.

And I can tell just from a lot of people I know in the industry, people who basically have their entire businesses built off of Instagram, and I’ve been warning people for years not to do it, but they do it anyway, right? They’re telling me that DMs aren’t working anymore and their posts aren’t getting any reach, isn’t getting any reach and their reels aren’t working as well.

instagram is following the playbook

This is coming from multiple different people I know in the industry. And it is slowly becoming a pay to play platform and it always will, doesn’t matter if it’s the new TikTok or whatever, they have to monetize at some point. Now Instagram, they’ve had ads for a long time, but now it seems like they are squelching the kind of massive organic growth that you can get.

And so it’s happening right now. And I just think that people should know that and be aware of it and also not be discouraged because what everyone who’s out there who’s trying to grow on, let’s just call it Instagram right now, they’re just going to tell you, oh, well, make sure you produce good content, do it frequently and that’s it, right?

That’s a great message and I agree, like you need to be consistent and your content should be good, but they’re giving you yesterday’s rules to today’s game. Today’s game doesn’t involve just posting consistently and making sure it’s good content. You have to pay to play now. And I think it’s only going to get worse.

And if it’s anything like the Facebook pages, which I hope they don’t go that far because it basically killed pages to where nobody cares about them or uses them really anymore. Hopefully they learned their lesson and they will leave some level of organic ability within Instagram, but it’s definitely headed in the wrong direction.

So what do we, so what do we do with all this information? Basically, I’m telling you, it’s going to be very hard to grow an organic social following and I could be wrong. There’s always that chance. I’m only sourcing this from probably five or six entrepreneurs I know in the industry who run their entire business through Instagram.

That’s not most of them. That’s not most of the people out there doing this stuff, but I just see it coming. And then through our own experience, experiments and experience, it seems to be that is the case. What do you do? It’s a pretty simple framework. You got to pay. You have to pay to play. That’s it now.

So if you have money, have money to spend. That’s great. You got to start putting it behind your content. And all I recommend people do, do not run direct call to action ads. And so this is where you have a product or service and you’re like, I want more P I want more customers because I want more customers.

My ads will be to go get me more customers. That’s a very hard game to master. You could hire an agency to do it, but here’s what I also know with agencies, this is going to happen in any of you who’ve hired an agency. This is probably the experience you had. It works. Whatever they have do initially, it works.

synergistic, not direct response

It works. Maybe maximum one to three months. It’s good. Then it’s going to dwindle. It’s not going to work. And that’s because most agencies don’t really know what they’re doing with social media advertising, especially if it’s like local brick and mortar stuff. So they’ll impress you for a short amount of time, but they won’t be able to continue to impress you.

And so I don’t recommend using an agency or doing direct call to action ads. I really don’t recommend it for most anyone is very hard to master. You have to have a lot of money to spend. What I recommend is more of a synergistic approach where you’re doing a lot of the organic content. And I mentioned this in a different episode where I talked about boosting reels on my platform that we’re doing organically okay.

And then putting a little bit money behind them. That’s all you need to be doing right now because it’s very inexpensive strategy. So just start boosting some of your content and see what happens from it. And then the goal inside of Instagram, again, I’m no Instagram expert, but I have done a lot of paid traffic.

And so now that this is going, it looks like we’re headed in the, oh, you need to be good at paid traffic to be good at this game. I think I’m about to get good at Instagram mainly because it’s, oh, we’re playing the same rules I already know in a new algorithm, new platform. Let’s go. You know, let’s spend some money.

We know, I know how to do this stuff. So just keep creating that content. Yeah. Be consistent. Make sure the message is good, but then throw some dollars behind it. So you want to be like doing a lot of different things. If you’re purely an online entrepreneur like me, then yeah, be doing the podcast, the YouTube, Instagram, like throwing all those things together.

You want a synergistic approach. There’s no one of these things that’s going to get you like your ability to knock it out of the park. If you’re local brick and mortar running a better human business and brick and mortar, it’s all of the local marketing referrals, those connections, those relationships, but then also boosting content in your local area of where people are aware of who you are.

And again, it’s just like repetition. It’s not, it’s getting people to understand who you are and saturate the market with who you are and not necessarily these direct call to action ads because direct call to action can even turn people off, especially in smaller markets. Oh, is that an, that, that annoying practice who always giving me those like $50 off an eval ad, you’ll become that person, especially if you have a smaller community.

the cost only goes up

If you live in a big city, maybe that doesn’t happen, but smaller community that might happen. So you just need to start giving valuable content, but then putting a couple of bucks behind it. That’s it. That’s the strategy. I wish it was more complicated than that. So if you have an agency, you can pay them one to $3,000 a month for ads, they’re going to work one to three months, or you could just keep creating good content, but then boost it, put a little bit of money behind it.

That’s it. That’s all I’m saying for now. That’s all you have to do. And it’s going to work in a more synergistic approach, but you should start doing that now. Just start setting aside some, some money, 50 bucks a month, 500 bucks a month, thousand dollars a month, whatever you think that you can afford.

And it’s just gotta be on. You turn it on. You don’t turn it off. It just gotta be on. This is going to be the new game. It’s going to be updated as I see more and more, but just very interesting what I’ve seen developing over, you know, what we’re doing with our own, I’m not going to dive into all the strategies because, uh, to be honest, we’re playing them a little bit close to the, to the vest right now, but I will update everyone eventually.

But you just have to pay to play. That’s what’s happening. That’s what I’m seeing from all these different entrepreneurs. That’s what I’m learning in our own experience. So just start doing that and then see what starts coming from it. And it’s annoying because you can’t track it as much, but one thing you, you learn when you start doing this kind of advertising is when it’s on, you have more leads, more customers.

When it’s off, you have fewer leads, fewer customers. That’s the only test that you need to run. Back in the day when I first started, that was the only way to track like any sort of social media advertising was like, it’s on, do I have more customers? It’s off to have less customers. And then you realize, oh, there’s actually a correlation here.

I don’t know how it happens or whatever I do. I’m saying you, you wouldn’t know because like you can’t track it all, right? So it’s just, it’s this synergistic effect of marketing that’s happening and you’re getting to experience that. And that’s all that you need to be striving for right now, especially with how inexpensive currently it is to boost a post.

That won’t always be the case, but I have to save that for later episodes because what happens with advertising, all forms of advertising is it’s, they start free. They let organic grow. They hook everyone. They start pay to play, starts cheap. It gets more expensive and it gets more and more expensive.

So eventually people will be priced out of being able to do social media advertising. Who knows? That could take another decade on Instagram, but we are there now. We are at the start, most certain of it. If that sounds like too much for you, you don’t want to have to figure out which content is performing best, which content to create, how to boost a post, which is all incredibly easy stuff, then you need to definitely try harder.