Have you seen a drop in your Facebook performance?
Do you want more fans to see your Facebook updates?
If so, you need to understand Facebook reach.
In this article, you’ll
find out what Facebook reach is, why some pages have more visibility than others and how to improve your own Facebook page reach.
What Is Facebook Reach?
Facebook is always
rolling out new features in
an effort to give users a more seamless and useful experience.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work in your favor when it comes to
reaching as many people as possible with your page content.
Facebook reach
is the number of unique people who saw your content. It affects every
other metric you can track: engagement, likes, comments, clicks and
negative feedback. And that’s not all. There are different kinds of
reach: post, page, organic, viral and paid.
Everything on Facebook boils down to reach.
Total Reach on Facebook.
Post reach and page reach, for example, are different and have different weight.
Post reach is the number of people who saw a specific post in their news feed.
Page reach is the number of people who saw any of your post content during a given period of time (daily, weekly or monthly).
These
two reach metrics can be deceiving or confusing. If you don’t post very
often, you may have a very high post reach, but a low page reach. If
you post often (e.g., five times a day or more) you may have a low post
reach, but a pretty high page reach.
Which one should you focus on?
Ask
yourself whether you want to have individual posts seen by the most
fans or make sure your brand gets in front of your fans on a regular
basis. Your answer determines which form of reach—post or page—is more important to you.
Post and page reach both have three main subcategories:
organic, viral and paid reach.
Organic reach
is the reach Facebook gives you for free. It happens in the news feed
when your fans see your updates. There are other possibilities, such as
random users visiting your page, but these are insignificant compared to
news feed views by fans.
Viral reach consists of
the people who see your content because someone else created a story
about it. For example, if a fan likes, comments or shares your post,
their friends will see your post even if they aren’t fans of your page.
The same is true if you’ve paid to reach larger audiences who may or may
not already be your fans. If one of those targeted people creates a
story, their friends will see it as well. Both are viral reach.
A
quick note about viral reach: When you export your Insights data to an
Excel spreadsheet, viral reach data is still included when you select
the old Insights format. However, viral reach is a subsection of organic
reach in the new version of
Insights, which was rolled out in 2013.
Expect to see viral reach metrics totally disappear from your Insights
and the Facebook API soon. Facebook has decided to go for simplicity
rather than detail.
Paid reach is a subset of post reach and is pretty easy to track and report. You paid for it, so you know where it came from. If you
pay to promote your posts, your post reach is going to be much bigger than your standard organic reach (because you’ve paid to reach more of your fans).
You can find paid reach metrics under the Post Reach area in Facebook Insights.
What’s the Best Way to Measure Facebook Reach?
Until
recently, it’s been common to benchmark your overall Facebook reach
against your total fans (even I was doing this). Many social media
marketers checked the number of people reached for a given post, and
then compared it to their total number fans and calculated a percentage
of how many fans they reached. That’s no longer the best way to look at
it.
Facebook’s new Insights gives you access to the number of fans who are online at any given point in time. A
Facebook page post lifespan rarely exceeds 2 to 3 hours.
Given that, we should
benchmark against the total number of fans who were on Facebook at that time.
For
example, in the graph below I can see that most of my fans are logged
into Facebook around 3:00pm. If I post at that time, about 3,500 of my
9,500 fans should be logged in.
Use
the When Your Fans Are Online option to find out when most of your fans
are logged into Facebook, then post at that time and use that reach as
your benchmark.
If the post reaches 600 people, I shouldn’t
look at it as 6.3% of my page’s fans (600 people out of 9,500), but
rather 17% of the fans (600 out of 3,500) who were online and reachable
when I posted it.
This is important when you’re explaining page performance to a boss or client. These are the results your hard work is producing!
How Hard Is It to Get Good Reach?
In December 2013, people started reporting a
big drop in organic reach
for the pages they were managing. The drop in organic reach varied—some
saw a large drop, some saw a small drop and others saw no change.
A post from
AdAge revealed a “leaked” deck from Facebook stating that
pages should expect their reach to continue decreasing and
be ready to pay for visibility in the news feed. The social media ecosystem and blogosphere were outraged.
Not
a single day in December passed without a new blog post on the subject.
Some were condemning Facebook for contriving sneaky new ways to steal
their money. Others were defending Facebook’s efforts to improve the
quality of content distributed in the news feed.
On December 20, I looked at the
average data
of more than 6,000 pages of various sizes and industries. The data
shows a constant decline over the previous six months, but no noticeable
drop in December (when people started reporting the issue). However, I
did discover an interesting trend.
Pages with high post engagement were the least affected
(if at all). Pages with a high engagement rate along with a high
negative feedback score (i.e., users hide your posts or report them as
spam) were more affected. Finally, pages with a very low engagement rate
were affected most.
The average monthly organic reach declined
from 73% to 55% of fan base (orange graph). Notice there’s no
significant drop in December for the average. However, that average
decline has not affected every page.
The black graph represents
the evolution of a nonprofit page I manage and its monthly organic reach
has increased during the same period. That page has very high post
engagement and very low negative feedback.
Working to increase post engagement may help you reach more fans in the news feed.
The type of content a page published also had an impact. Photo posts had the most negative effect, so
if you post a lot of photos and have a low engagement rate, you’re probably suffering more than the average page.
Do Other Social Networks Offer Better Reach?
When
the Facebook reach issue was ignited in December, many social marketers
branded Facebook as a fraud and advised that it was time to move on to
other social networks, Google+ being the lead contender. That emotional
reaction was inherently wrong on all levels.
The most important flaw in that plan is that
other social networks don’t provide any kind of reach metric. Only Facebook provides that data. When the other networks do provide analytics, they’re nothing close to the breadth of information Facebook gives page owners.
Most
social marketers were upset about the pay-to-play aspect of Facebook’s
new reach algorithm. They blamed it on Facebook being a publicly traded
company and accused it of only being out for money.
Consider this: Do you think Google is acting as a nonprofit with no interest in
monetizing you and your data?
Google’s changes to its search algorithm (e.g., Panda, Penguin and
Hummingbird) have been far more damaging to online businesses than
Facebook’s reach tweaks. When a business’s free SEO ranking goes dark,
in many cases they pay for AdWords to stay in front of their audience.
Facebook has one of the
best targeting
options for businesses. For some of us, leaving Facebook to rely solely
upon Google AdWord’s targeting capabilities would be business suicide.
Don’t automatically discount Facebook from your social media mix. Image source: iStockPhoto.com.
Overall, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Twitter are different and complementary, not opposing alternatives to each other.
Look at Facebook as a component of your strategy, not the whole thing.
If
most of your audience is on Pinterest or Google+, focus more energy
there, but why leave the place where the people you need to reach are
spending all of their time?
Does Paying for Facebook Reach Give a Good Return on Investment?
For
some, paying Facebook for exposure will become a necessity. Is this
such a bad thing? Should you be concerned about the need to pay to
increase your content visibility? Not necessarily.
Of course, some content doesn’t deserve to be paid for and some does. Paying to
promote the right content in order to reach more people in your target audience (fans or not), can lead to a lot of conversions.
First,
make a distinction between casual content and business-worthy content.
Photos from your latest speaking gig, videos of fun things you do at
the office and quick news updates about your niche are all relevant and
good, but should you pay to get more exposure for them? Nah. Those posts
don’t impact your bottom line.
When you post about fun stuff you do at the office, it’s not about reaching a big number of your fans.
But
if you’re announcing a new product, new features, an ebook or webinar
or other content you’ve spent hours on, isn’t it worth it to pay $30 or
$50 to
make sure your hard work is seen
by 9,000 people instead of 1,000? Yes! Your time and specialized
content are worth it. Why waste those efforts to save $30 or $50? That’s
nonsense.
If you’re sharing the type of content you can
track for short-term ROI (e.g., leads or revenue), isn’t it worth it to
pay $100 or $150 to generate 300 or 400 hot qualified leads or 10 new subscribers with a lifetime value of $400?
You bet! Actually, for this kind of content, I haven’t found a more
affordable way to generate ROI with PPC, and I’ve tried a LOT of
options.
When posting about a new product or feature that can generate new customers, it’s worth it to pay for more reach.
In
the example below, the cost to acquire a new customer via sponsored
posts was between $20 and $30, which is around 10% of our average
revenue per customer. Pretty good return on investment as far as I’m
concerned.
Paying for extended reach can result in higher ROI.
What Are the Best Tactics to Sustain Facebook Reach?
If you want to make the most of Facebook reach this year, I have a few ideas on how to do that. Posting relevant
curated content
or reposting your own evergreen content are great ways to encourage
engagement (which translates to reach), especially when you
post when your fans are on Facebook.
Posting
more often and at different times of day are your best tactics to
increase your overall reach and brand awareness. Pages that
post at least three times a day get very high page reach metrics and much more brand awareness than pages that only post once a day or fewer.
In
the example below, the page on the left has a pretty high post reach
(24% of fans are reached for each post!). The page on the right has a
much lower post reach. However, the page on the right posts several
times a day while the one on the left only posts once a day. The overall
page reach is much higher for the one on the right (93% of fans reached
on a monthly basis versus 53%). Neither of these pages are using paid
reach; it’s all organic.
Posting frequency affects your post and page reach.
Creating
consistently great content is hard. If you’re relying on great content
produced in-house to nurture your Facebook page, you need to change your
approach.
Curation is the cheapest and most effective way to
produce more high-quality, shareable content. There are plenty of
experts in your industry, and they all invest a ton of time crafting
great content.
Have the right curation tools in place to help you spot content quickly and share the best of it on your page. Remember, the goal here is brand awareness. You’ll get that by sharing high-quality content for your audience to see.
Other
types of content you can share are events like attending or speaking at
a conference or even appearing on a TV or radio show. This kind of post
takes less than five minutes to do—you just need to add them into your
daily routine.
Sharing your special events gets your brand in front of fans and keeps them in the loop.
Sharing
content doesn’t have to be a “go big or go home” scenario. Sharing
quick nuggets of content along with your in-depth blog articles mixes
things up and keeps it interesting.
Post a fun fact or an expert opinion or question about the latest news in your industry.
When you find an interesting article that’s relevant to your niche,
just hit Share and add a small introduction. This kind of content is
super-easy to create and sustains brand awareness.
Share interesting content relevant to your fans for more engagement and reach.
Don’t forget your evergreen content! Once a week, plan to
reshare your best and most costly pieces of content to get them in front of new fans.
Jon Loomer
does this a lot and it’s one of his tricks that allows him to post 2 or
3 times daily. Here’s a post on Jon Loomer’s Facebook page published on
February 9 about a blog post originally published on November 18. It’s
still getting likes, shares and clicks!
Don’t waste your evergreen content; it deserves to be shared again and again.
While
it can be frustrating when Facebook changes the rules of the game, you
can still use the network to your advantage. Understanding how reach
affects all reported data, choosing content wisely and paying to promote
posts that can result in conversions can put you ahead in the end.
Compare your reach performance against the average and use the tips here to help you get better results.
What do you think? Have you noticed a dip in your Facebook reach? Do you have any tips to keep your posts front and center in the news feed? Let us know in the comments.
