Facebook fans are not necessarily the best advocates for your business, according to Marshall Manson, managing director, EAME, at digital consultancy Social@Ogilvy.

The decline of organic reach means a Facebook page with an average of 100,000 fans can only expect to reach about 6,000, while pages with about 500,000 fans now have an average organic reach of 2%. Despite the drop, says Manson, Facebook continues to give, but investment is required.

Delivering the right content is key and he advises using organic reach as a means to test which material promotes the highest levels of engagement. However, dealers need to adopt a newsroom mentality and tailor content according to topics that are trending. Facebook rewards newsworthy content and will give it greater prominence in the newsfeed, above offers and promotions.

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Manson said there is still value in Facebook, but it is unlikely to lie in the fans themselves. He illustrated Social@Ogilvy’s analysis with an example of McDonald’s Belgium, which had 246,000 fans, but found only a fifth interacted with its content. By using Facebook’s sophisticated targeting, the brand found it could generate a higher response rate. In fact, paid targeting aimed at non-fan advocates generated an average five times more word-of-mouth than targeting fans.

“Relying on advocates is wrong,” said Manson. “Interestingly, it is not the fans who convert. We need to stop thinking about social as the place to just reach our fans and start thinking about social as the place to do some really sophisticated targeting with some great content.

“It means being timely, it means being interesting, it means being newsworthy and it means having a judgment on what will connect with people.”