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

Another short and sweet episode this week. With Facebook’s share price copping a hammering over the past week or so, we wanted to get a little topical and serve up some food for thought on how this relates to your own approach to online advertising and SEO.

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TRANSCRIPT

Local Digital  0:04
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 host, Michael and Arthur.

Arthur  0:23
Welcome to another episode of the SEO show. How’re you doing today?

Michael  0:27
I’m doing pretty well. How are you going?

Arthur  0:28
Yeah, not bad. I’m happy that I got to do the intro today.

Michael  0:32
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’re talking off air and trying to figure out the intro. But um, 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.

Arthur  0:51
I completely forgot.

Michael  0:52
I don’t think we bother anyway. Like, it’s not it’s not that exciting.

Arthur  0:56
No, have a look at us on Instagram, follow our local digital Instagram page.

Michael  1:01
That’s the best you’re gonna get, I guess. Um, so we go to I don’t know how this episode’s gonna turn out this week. Because you know, we have a 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 Mehta stock dropped about 25% and they lost 230 bill off their value absolutely tanked. Absolutely tanked. I gotta say, I kind of you know, I work in the industry, run a lot of Facebook ads and stuff. But I really joy seeing them get out like that, because Facebook’s very painful to deal with as an advertiser, you know, supports non existent. They don’t care about anything other than making money, it seems. And they lost 230 bill in one week. So I take it you don’t have any shares on Facebook? I’m at all I definitely wouldn’t have any shares in them.

Arthur  1:50
You’d be spilling if you did. That’s not to

Michael  1:53
say you know, like it is. We we as a business spend a tonne on Facebook ads. We have clients that spend a tonne it works. But um, just as a company, I don’t like them that much. But yeah, anyway, I dropped another 5% as well, this week. I was reading. I’m looking at it now. Yeah, it doesn’t look good, does it? So

Arthur  2:10
it’s slightly slightly up. But yeah, 30 30% down in the past month.

Michael  2:16
There we go. So what does this have to do with SEO? Well, we’re gonna get to that in a minute. 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 they didn’t hit their learning targets. So it’s all pretty bad news in the tech world. And it’s why the stock has dropped. And 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 happen. And then also they’re saying tic TOCs being competitive, you know, a lot more competitive.

Arthur  2:52
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, I look personally I very rarely use Facebook outside of work. i A lot of people I know don’t use Facebook anymore. So people are definitely shifting on to different platforms.

Michael  3:04
Well, when you say us, 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 already. Like there’s a whole use

Arthur  3:15
case has changed. Historically, you know, it would be about your life. You’d post photos you check in everywhere. Now it’s just another media outlet.

Michael  3:25
Pretty much. Yeah. You consuming media content on there and ads. So the ads are working. We know that we do a lot of advertising. But look, Facebook is a business is in trouble, I feel and I’m putting a lot of faith and expectation into this metaverse. Metaverse, whatever the hell it is a fad. Yeah, this product. I don’t know what the hell it is. Will people even want it? I

Arthur  3:45
thought crypto was a fad when it started and it still is. Oh, here we are. Yeah,

Michael  3:49
look, who knows. But time will tell. But that’s a long way I’ve been 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 tonne of headwinds for them. You know, Metaverse doesn’t exist yet tick tock 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. 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’re going 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 diversified you have more traffic sources leads coming from other places.

Arthur  4:50
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket basically.

Michael  4:53
Exactly. Exactly. And look um, 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 into Google Trends. And you can 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. And only really, right now makes more sense to invest in SEO right,

Arthur  5:39
definitely. Do you remember when Google was going to pull out of the Australian market? Was it last year or the year before?

Michael  5:44
Yeah, go over the news. Publishers are definitely saying they have to pay publishers. Yeah. Imagine if they did, and like a business was built 100%. Exactly. Google ads, you’d be gone overnight. So businesses know this, or at least, 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, I didn’t stop I 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 bit of a short to the point episode this week, in that that’s all we wanted to talk about is just something that was in the news, something that was interesting, and 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 FBO. And if you look at things like this happening, it’s just sort of more evidence of why that’s important.

Arthur  6:42
What do you think is going to happen? directing the share price will eventually bounce back up or will continue to, I don’t know, three, four,

Michael  6:49
I feel that they like they’ve sort of peaked in the amount of uses they have particularly like Western markets. Yeah, I reckon it’s gonna go backwards. Yeah, they’d losing it like they have in the past last 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

Arthur  7:06
of talking about metadata. We’re talking about Instagram. Yeah,

Michael  7:09
I’m talking more about Facebook in this context. Instagrams probably in a better place, and like they’re getting out there now pushing real, heaps more to try and compete with Tik Tok. Like they launched rails and sort of half baked, it’s not like, tick tock, not that much of a tick tock either, either. Am I not as good? I’m

Arthur  7:27
not their target market. Yeah. But um, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. Hmm.

Michael  7:33
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. I’m probably going to be wrong and people will just love it and dive in then exist purely in the metaverse.

Arthur  7:49
People are buying property in the metaverse. Like, why didn’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 a serious money. So good. Yeah. And I personally I don’t get it. I don’t know if it’s money laundering or if it’s something different than

Michael  8:10
it’s not based, like property is based on like constraints supply prices go up because it’s a you know, there’s a limited supply of that asset like your house on the hub. There’s any so many exactly the metaverse, they 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? We should do a podcast on NF T’s. Alright. Nf T’s what are they? Who knows? All right, done. But um, look? Yeah, to me that, like they’re betting the house on that at the moment, though, they’re getting almost 100% of their revenue from AD they’re an ad business you’re like,

Arthur  8:43
it was a panic move, maybe trying to keep them relevant. You know,

Michael  8:47
maybe they’re having to innovate, right? So I bought Instagram, they bought WhatsApp. Now they’re having to innovate and this is what they’re doing. But they’re it’s a long way off being anything. They losing users. People are more into Tik Tok like Instagrams still good. They need to try and get people using Facebook more like socially, like posting and that that’s gonna be hard to turn around. Yeah. 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, he 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, hope you enjoyed this episode of the SEO show. We’re gonna be back next week with a you know, he’s done a couple of short episodes here. We’re gonna be back next week with a proper in depth.

Arthur  9:46
Let’s do a q&a next week.

Michael  9:47
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 sewing.

Unknown Speaker  9:56
Bye.