Improve facebook page interaction

[EricaMcGillivray]

Yep, Facebook has massively changed how it shows content to followers of your page, which has killed most organic showings in the newsfeed or severely limited it. This started about a year and a half ago and has just gotten worse over time.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Hi Noah,

Yes, unfortunately, over the past year and a half or so, Facebook has drastically changed its algorithm in what it will show users in their News Feed. Unfortunately, brand pages have suffered the brunt of this. At Moz, we've seen something very similar. We have over 170,000 "likes" to our page, but our posts rarely see more than 3,000 views and some are as low as 400. We also play by the book and try to engage our audience in relevant manners, which Facebook has claimed is how to get more engagement.

In February of this year, the Federalist tried to "crack the Facebook algo." They found several strong factors and came up with the following equation about Daily Organic Reach of your page:

Daily Organic Reach = -22 + (Total Likes x 5.399%) + (Daily Paid Reach x 0.327%) + (Page Views x 0.416%) + (Weekend [1 if yes, 0 if no] x -194.4) + (Posts Per Day x 81.08)

I'd love to see more brands messing around with the elements in this algo -- which include paid ads, which Facebook swears don't count for or against your organic reach -- to see how much is true.

[Atomicx]

It totally makes Facebook a waste of time for marketing. I used it to build up brand recognition. All of my likes have been organic through contests, giveaways, and paid FB ads. I have spent a good deal of money building up my name on FB just to have my efforts made meaningless by this change in their system.

I do not personally care if 5000 people see a funny image that I post. That does not help me in any way. But sadly 90% of my posts are images as that is the only thing that Facebook sends out. The few times that I do try to push out an actual link to my site dies in  vain as apparently only 300 of 50,000 people are shown the link, and only 20-40 people will like my links.

I saw this Federalist post when it first came out and thought it was interesting. I tested it on a client's site and did not see similar results.

[EricaMcGillivray]

I think it's very much worth figuring out and questioning why you use Facebook as a medium for your marketing. What you get out of it and what people get from your brand. For Moz, we know people contact us there for customer support, and even if our posts get shown to 0 people (at which point, we'd stop posting there), we'll need to maintain a presence because people reach out to us at a higher volume there. This is not true for everyone.

Buffer recently did some testing on their Facebook account with various techniques, and here's what they found.

In my opinion, it's very okay for a social media manager to say "Facebook isn't working for us anymore, this is not where we'll be putting our time anymore." And telling customers that on the page. Since Facebook is a free network and you don't own it, unfortunately, this means that they can change the functionality at anytime and there's nothing we can do about it.

[Atomicx]

Well we have already moved our monthly budget to instagram and adwords. We are focusing more on twitter now too as we still maintain our Facebook page. But we can't afford to be throwing away money on a platform that I feel is dying.

What are your thoughts on https://blog.bufferapp.com/anatomy-of-a-perfect-facebook-post

I find this interesting but have found totally different results.

[max.favilli]

We tried many of the same things they describes and got to the same conclusion. Links posting is getting the second largest reach. In our case differently from others, video uploads got the largest reach.

[Atomicx]

That's interesting. Our links and videos are by far the lowest reaching pieces of content. Our links only get shared if we include them in with an image

[max.favilli]

Yes, we always include an image when posting a link.

[Vacatia_SEO]

"I am not going to pay to boost my posts to my already existing fans."

Not sure why you wouldn't want to pay to market to an audience that has already said they "liked" your brand. Instead you are going to run ads on Google to people who you have no idea if they're interested in you? You've garnered 10000 likes and you can spend $30 per post to promote it to everyone. If it is engagement and reach you want, $30-$50 can go a long way.

My companies FB page has a little over 4000 followers. Without promoting, 100-200 of them see a post and we only get a handful of likes and maybe one comment. When we promote them for $30 we got almost 100% reach to our followers, upwards of 100 likes and anywhere from 5-15 comments.

Not all marketing is conversion focused. Like you said, we use Facebook for branding. Great. Branding isn't free though. If you posted 4 times a week and paid $25/post to promote those posts you are looking at $400/month to build your brand to people who have already given you the thumbs up.

You can use that marketing spend to identify brand ambassadors and then slowly create a community of people who will advocate for you and your product. If you come at it with the thinking: "If I spend $100 I need 3 customers then Facebook is definitely not the right place for you."

[max.favilli]

I may sound naive, but in my balance sheet what it matters is sales, revenue and profit. Branding has a value as long as it bring customers, otherwise is charity to FB.

If you have any numbers showing your branding spending on FB translate into sales and thus can be called investement, I would gladly see those numbers, otherwise it's charity.

[EricaMcGillivray]

While there's many reasons for a brand not to invest in Facebook, having issues tracking ROI directly back to sales is not one of them. There are many other reasons to invest in social media that support marketing efforts: branding, customer service, community building, etc.

I do think many brands overly invest in Facebook when they shouldn't because it's not right for their audience.

[max.favilli]

Tracking ROI is not an issue. Branding without ROI is an issue.

Cutomer service for me is no marketing, you plugin any CRM software into your FB account and you have an additional channel to stay in touch with your customers and that's ok.

So we have one thing called branding, take the brand you think is more appropriate for FB branding, Coca Cola, Burberry, Tesla, whatever you want. And write down a formula which calculate the ROI of your branding investement on FB for that brand. I would love to see that figure.

[Atomicx]

I would have to spend 100-150 per post to reach my entire audience. And that would not lead to a lot of site visits or conversions for me for the money that I am spending.