Facebook's Plummeting Share Price & What It Means For SEO

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

ARTHUR: Welcome to another episode of the SEO show. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well. How are you going? Yeah, not bad. I'm happy that I got to do the intro today.

MICHAEL: After last week, after we had a team meeting this week to confirm that you were doing the intro. Did we? Yeah, just beforehand when we were like talking off air and trying to figure out the intro. But I've got a question for you. Did you set the Instagram account up? Nope. Didn't think you would. That was your project to do. I completely forgot. I don't think we bother anyway. Like it's not, it's not that exciting to have a look at us on Instagram, follow our local digital Instagram page. That's the best you're going to get, I guess. So we got to, don't know how this episode is going to turn out this week. Because we have our little sheet here of ideas that we want to talk about. And on it, we chucked one in. Because we've seen that Facebook, you would have seen that their parent company, Meta, stock dropped about 25%. They lost $230 off their value. Absolutely tanked. Absolutely tanked. I got to say, I kind of, you know, I work in the industry, run a lot of Facebook ads and stuff, but I really enjoy seeing them get hurt like that because Facebook's very painful to deal with as an advertiser, you know, the support's non-existent. They don't care about anything other than making money, it seems. And they lost 230 bill in one week.

ARTHUR: So I take it you don't have any shares in Facebook. I'm better.

MICHAEL: I definitely wouldn't have any shares in them.

ARTHUR: You'd be spewing if you did.

MICHAEL: That's not to say, you know, like it is we, we as a business spend a ton on Facebook ads. We have clients that spend a ton. It works, but I'm just as a company, I don't like them that much, but yeah, anyway, it dropped another 5% as well. This week I was reading.

ARTHUR: I'm looking at it now.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It doesn't look good. Does it?

ARTHUR: So it's slightly, slightly up, but yeah, 30, 30% down in the past month. There we go.

MICHAEL: So what does this have to do with SEO? Well, we're going to get to that in a minute, but I was thinking about this, right? Like, so this is the biggest drop they've ever seen. Like the first time they've ever lost users as well. They lost like a million users or something like that. And, um, they didn't hit their earning targets. So it's all pretty bad news in the tech world. Hence why the stock has dropped. And, um, They're blaming two things for this, which is the Apple iOS updates. That has been a pain, you know, as an advertiser on Facebook, it does make it tougher. And they're saying that users are opting out of tracking and it's making things hard there. And then also they're saying TikTok's being competitive, you know, a lot more competitive.

ARTHUR: Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I look personally, I very rarely use Facebook outside of work. A lot of people I know don't use Facebook anymore. So people are definitely shifting onto different platforms.

MICHAEL: Well, when you say use, I might be different for you, but I feel a lot of people check it and scroll through it, but don't post like post content on it.

ARTHUR: The whole use case has changed. Historically, you know, it would be about your life. You'd post photos, you'd check in everywhere. Now it's just another media outlet.

MICHAEL: Pretty much. Yeah. You're consuming media content on there and ads. So the ads are working. We know that we do a lot of advertising, but look. Facebook as a business is in trouble, I feel, and they're putting a lot of faith and expectation into this metaverse, whatever the hell it is. A fad? Yeah, I don't know what the hell it is.

ARTHUR: Will people even want it? I thought crypto was a fad when it started. It still is. Well, here we are.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Look, who knows, but time will tell, but that's a long way of being profitable. So at the end of the day, I'm going to get to the SEO angle here. Facebook derives 97% of its income from running ads. And there's a ton of headwinds for them. You know, Metaverse doesn't exist yet. TikTok super competitive iOS has hammered them and as a business they suck. So their share price has tanked. Now let's relate this to how it relates to SEO. What I want to say is don't have all of your traffic and leads tied up in a single channel like Google ads or Facebook ads or word of mouth, you know, just sitting there and hoping customers come along. Now, if you have 90% plus of your business coming from a single source, you're in big trouble when something changes with that source. Whereas if you make the investment in SEO, you know, you go multi-channel, you might have those paid channels, but you're also investing in your SEO in the long run. That's going to be better for you. You diversified, you have more traffic sources, leads coming from other places.

ARTHUR: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, basically.

MICHAEL: Exactly. Exactly. And look, Google Trends at the moment backs this up. Like I did a search before this podcast where over the past five years, globally, I put the keyword, maybe search engine optimization in the topic to Google Trends. And you could see over the five year period, it's growing steadily. And then over the past year, it's really exploded. So while Facebook's going backwards, the interest in SEO is exploding. And I think that's because businesses know that whoever has the best organic presence and traffic is going to really win the game. You can't be too reliant on these channels where one little change, you know, ad networks constantly making tweaks or existential threats like Apple sort of loitering in the background and changing things. It only really right now makes more sense to invest in SEO, right?

ARTHUR: Definitely. Do you remember when Google was going to pull out of the Australian market? Was it last year or the year before?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Over the news, the publishers, like the government was saying, they have to pay publishers. Yeah. Imagine if they did. And like a business was built a hundred percent on Google ads. You'd be gone overnight. So businesses know this, or at least the, I guess the ones sort of tuned into this stuff do. And the ones that are investing heavily now, or even better, the ones that kept investing all the way through the pandemic, the past two years, they didn't stop. are reaping the rewards. You know, they have the organic traffic, they have the leads coming in, they're not beholden to an ad platform for all of their business. So, a bit of a short and to the point episode this week in that that's all we wanted to talk about. It's just something that was in the news, something that was interesting, something that was relevant to the SEO show and what we do here. So, we've been banging on about the importance of long-term consistent investment in SEO. And if you look at things like this happening, it's just sort of more evidence of why that's important.

ARTHUR: What do you think is going to happen? Do you reckon the share price will eventually bounce back up or will continue to? I don't know.

MICHAEL: Freefall. I feel that they've sort of peaked in the amount of users they have, particularly in like Western markets. Yeah. I reckon it's going to go backwards. Yeah. They're losing it. Like they have in the past lost users in the US and then kept growing, but I feel they're sort of done in terms of the ceiling that they can get in terms of.

ARTHUR: We're talking about meta though. We're talking about Instagram. Yeah.

MICHAEL: I'm talking more about Facebook in this context. Um, Instagram is probably in a better place and like they're getting to now they're now pushing reels heaps more to try and compete with Tik TOK. Like they launched reels and it's sort of half baked. It's not like Tik TOK, not that I'm much of a Tik TOK user, but neither am I. I'm not as good.

ARTHUR: I'm not the target market. Yeah. But, um, Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

MICHAEL: I think like I wouldn't be buying shares and holding it for the long term in Facebook. They're betting the house on the metaverse and everything I've seen of it, I hate. So I'm probably going to be wrong and people will just love it and dive in there and exist purely in the metaverse.

ARTHUR: People are buying property in the metaverse like. Well, I don't get that. Dropping serious money on like virtual land and like yachts. I remember reading someone bought a yacht in the metaverse for over a million dollars, like serious money. I personally, I don't get it. I don't know if it's money laundering or if it's something different, but.

MICHAEL: It's not based like property is based on like constrained supply prices go up because it's a, you know, there's a limited supply of that asset, like a house on the Harbor. There's only so many. Exactly. The metaverse, there could be trillions of houses just created out of nowhere. So how do you know what a good one is and where the value is?

ARTHUR: We should do a podcast on NFTs.

MICHAEL: I don't know, NFTs, what are they? Who knows? All right, done. But look, yeah, to me that like, they're betting their house on that. At the moment though, they're getting almost 100% of their revenue from ads. They're an ad business.

ARTHUR: Do you feel like it was a panic move maybe? Trying to keep them relevant, you know? Maybe.

MICHAEL: They're having to innovate, right? That's it. They bought Instagram, they bought WhatsApp. Now they're having to innovate and this is what they're doing. Hmm. But there it's a long way off being anything they're losing users. People are more into tech talks, like Instagram is still good. Um, they need to try and get people using Facebook more like socially, like posting and that, which that's going to be hard to turn around.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So, um, yeah. Anyway, how this relates to SEO, as we said, don't be too reliant on one channel. You don't want to be the Facebook of the world. You want to be, I don't know who you want to be. Let's say Google, they make money from all sorts of different ways. So be more like Google, less like Facebook. So with those wise words, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the SEO show. We're going to be back next week with a, you know, we've done a couple of short episodes here. We're going to be back next week with a proper in-depth. Let's do a Q&A next week. You reckon Q&A? Yeah. We've had some good questions come in. Yeah. We'll be back with the Q&A, just delivering value bomb after value bomb. So until then, happy SEOing.