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How to react to halved reach on Facebook
New research shows that Facebook has halved the reach of brands’ Facebook page posts, with the result that fans will still see the most engaging posts from brands, but will be much less likely to see the less engaging ones.
With Facebook saying “all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family”, brands will need to change their social content strategies, spending more on better, higher value posts which resonate with their community, complemented with paid promotion.
The story started two weeks ago with an unverified report that Facebook has changed its EdgeRank algorithm to reduce the amount of brands’ Facebook page posts seen in fans’ newsfeeds, suggesting the reach of posts would decrease by anywhere between 5% – 40%.
On Monday last week came the first independent verification of the change, with a study looking at 3,000 Facebook pages, showing a 20% drop in the reach of those pages.
To find out what was going on, and to see how things have developed since then, I turned to We Are Social’s friends and partners at Socialbakers to pull some data.
Average post organic reach 10th Aug- 9th Oct, based on 15,380 posts made by the 157 of the most active commercial pages in the period.
As you can see, there seems to have been a significant decline in reach since the end of August. Meaning the average post reach has dropped by around 50% to an average of around 12%.
The precise drop in reach that any of your pages will have experienced will of course vary – previous to this change in EdgeRank, reach ranged from an average of 33% for pages with less than 500 fans all the way down to 5.6% for pages with over a million fans.
Looking at the average page post engagement rate, it seems to have fluctuated slightly, but broadly it’s still tracking around the 0.4% level:
Average post engagement rate 10th Aug- 9th Oct, based on 15,380 posts made by the 157 of the most active commercial pages in the period.
In order for the average engagement rate to stay stable while the average post reach has reduced by 50%, this must mean that the posts that are getting seen by fans are now getting more engagement.
So what’s going on? Is this a cynical ploy by Facebook to boost advertising revenue from brands? Or an understandable adjustment to compensate for the growing number of pages that people are fans of, and the increased activity of those pages?
All Facebook will publically say on the issue is:
We’re continuing to optimize News feed to show the posts that people are most likely to engage with, ensuring they see the most interesting stories. This aligns with our vision that all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family.
Based on that statement and what we see from Socialbakers’ data, it’s clear that Facebook have indeed changed their EdgeRank algorithm to reduce the amount of brands’ Facebook page posts seen in fans’ newsfeeds.
More specifically, they’re trying to do so in a way that fans still see brands’ most engaging posts, but are much less likely see the less engaging ones.
EdgeRank has always worked in this way, but now it’s been turbocharged and brands are competing for a much smaller ‘share of newsfeed’, so optimizing your posts for engagement is now even more important.
Reduced organic reach, combined with Facebook’s recent evidence that “reach drives revenue for online brand marketers,” means boosting the reach of your posts with Facebook media spend is essential – but remember it’s the engaging posts that will perform better. Sponsoring posts which are not engaging is a waste of your money.
As a result, brands will need to change their social content strategies, spending more on better, higher value posts which resonate with their community. Or as we say at We Are Social, content OF the people, not AT the people.
The time when brands could get by on Facebook by buying fans and basic community management is well and truly over. Facebook’s changes mean brands need to shift to creating social content that is “as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family” and supplement this with a sophisticated paid promotion strategy. And unless they have these skills in house, they will need the help of specialist social agencies with the ability to create this engaging content and plan media against it.
Update: Facebook have published the following article, News Feed, Engagement, and Promoted Posts: How They Work, which tries to explain their side of the story, and a whitepaper, Understanding Paid and Earned Reach on Facebook, which shows that brands can reach on average 5x more people using paid media in addition to organic publishing.
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One word: why? What is the evidence that brand ‘engagement’ drives any value for the brand?
Spot on Robin. Facebook is gradually (or maybe quickly) becoming a media owner – it’s in their best interests to ‘sell’ eyeballs, even though it’s still – just – in brands’ best interests to earn them…
Top analysis
Fantastic article. I hope smaller businesses and brands understand that money shouldn’t be spent on JUST ads that get gross numbers but virtually no meaningful engagement. One would hear a lot of smaller brands complaining how it’s difficult to compete with ‘big brands’ – what many of them don’t realize is how much of an advantage they have: smaller communities which are actual people who are actually interested in what their brand has to offer.
Advertising has helped kill FB. I now get more pointless ads than posts from friends. A posts from a friend who for some reason “liked” an company’s ad, is annoying at worst or just very dull at best. My teenage daughters don’t use FB anymore, at all. I understand FB is still growing inexorably by the day, but the developed markets are bored.
David Russell
Interesting article – but l hope the Facebook edge rank algorithm considers post engagement quality when considering whether or not it’s engaging. As a brand social media manager, l would hate to see my quality brand content ranking below some ‘highly engaging’, yet poor quality ‘like and share’ post from another brand.
I think we can assume if you “engage” with a brand then that will have a possitive effect with your customer. The question is simply ROI. How much time did you spend engaging with that person and how much money did you make from that effort?
David Russell
Interesting move but one which could drive many already skeptical brands off of Facebook for good. That’s the last thing FB needs as it struggles to remain relevant.
I think this is a good move by Facebook for the greater good in the long run. I also believe the engagement will be relative volume rather than total volume so that all size brands fit into the equation.
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Excellent article! I would love to know at what point a post becomes as engaging as a post from “friends and family”. Is it 1, 2, 3% Virality?
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I help run a Facebook publishing page and we found that we clawed most of what was lost (up 55% on some streams of content) by re-jigging timings, adjusting text and image combinations, and % of text to images etc. Didn’t seem to take long of looking at our stats to figure out. Have to say it’s weird to have to readjust everything not because of what we can see people are engaging with, but just because FB decides this is how they’re doing it.
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True. however there is lots to suggest that even the most basic of metrics do. How about reach and frequency?
Great article – thanks! I, too, am curious as to when a post becomes as engaging as a post from friends and family. We are also readjusting, and I’m considering ceasing my third-party app usage (which will be more time consuming, but perhaps help counteract this new FB initiative).
At the end of the day, it´s all about numbers. But it should be about building wealth, not mesmerizing over infographics.
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Hi Robin,
Great post – Sure a lot of self-marketing professionals and business owners
will find extreme value in the tips you’ve shared. As Facebook is one of the
channels used the most today when it comes to social media marketing.
The frustrating thing for me is that the type of content we’re posting hasn’t changed – posts that used to engage our fans and gain a number of comments now aren’t seeing as much interaction. We always ppsted lots of images and things inviting comments, so the quality of our content hasn’t changed. But I am doing some experimentation with timings and posting even more images and so on, so hoping that will enable us to claw back some of our reach as you say!
quick question – does anyone here have an international page and know what the optimal times are for reaching various audiences? My page is UK based and has a lot of UK likes, but nearly 50% of our audiences is in the US. Typically I would have done two posts a day – one to reahc the UK audience in early afternoon, one to reach the US audience in their morning, but I’m wondering if this is right. Anyone have any tips on timings for international audiences?
Thanks for the post.
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Good time to try an alternative. Qubey is a new emerging alternative that puts the power in the users hands. Still in BETA, they clearly have a plan for the future worth investigating. qubeey.com is the site
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This is happening more and more right now, but there is a way around it www.nikkipilkington.com/how-can-i-get-more-people-to-see-my-posts-on-my-facebook-business-page/
I help run a Facebook publishing page and we found that we clawed most of what was lost (up 55% on some streams of content) by re-jigging timings, adjusting text and image combinations, and % of text to images etc. Didn’t seem to take long of looking at our stats to figure out. Have to say it’s weird to have to readjust everything not because of what we can see people are engaging with, but just because FB decides this is how they’re doing it.
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