Pages Tagging Pages: Good News for Organic Reach on Facebook

We are very excited today to be bringing you some good news about your Facebook page’s potential for organic reach! Being the bearer of bad news is no fun – like when text only updates got the boot, or organic reach declined – so this is a welcome opportunity.

This week, Facebook announced a new capability that will allow brands to potentially show up in the News Feeds of users who do not follow them, provided they are talking about something or someone that user does follow. In the words of Product Manager Andrew Song;

“…we’re adding a new way for people to discover conversations around topics they’ve expressed interest in.”

Here’s an example. Say you like Pagemodo on Facebook (who are we kidding, of course you do). With this new functionality, a public personality like George Takei could mention Pagemodo (which would be awesome), and his post could show up in your News Feed, even if you don’t like George Takei (yet). This means that George would get exposure to a whole new audience, just because he mentioned and tagged Pagemodo in his post.

If you’re more of a visual person, here’s an example from Facebook. We see here that Bleacher Report has tagged Dwight Howard in a post. Now some people who like Dwight Howard are seeing Bleacher Report’s post, even if they don’t like Bleacher Report, because someone they do like was mentioned by that page:

So, how can you use this to your advantage as a small business? As with any form of content marketing, you want to start with your audience and think about what interests them.

Say you’re a florist, and you want to get organic exposure to an audience of women who are looking for wedding flowers. You could find a floral image from a magazine like Southern Weddings, and post that image to Facebook. In your post, tag Southern Weddings’ Facebook page when you compliment their style. Hopefully, some of the many brides-to-be who like Southern Weddings would then see your post because it mentions a page they like. This would give you exposure to an audience of people who would otherwise have to hope would find you on their own.

As Mashable points out, personal users can already do this by tagging one another. So what already worked person-to-person now also works page-to-page. However, it still does not work person-to-page.

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It's Not All About "Likes"

There are many metrics in the market to measure a campaign:‘Likes, shares, comments, followers, favorites, retweets, you name it. These are the standard metrics that marketers embrace to justify their marketing campaigns.

The ‘Like’ Argument

In a recent study done by Association of National Advertisers (ANA) 2014 Social Content Development Survey (see image courtesy of eMarketer.com), these are the metrics used by marketers to measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. A whopping 89% measure effectiveness based on ‘Likes’ and only 24% on sales conversion.

Hang on; shouldn’t it be ‘Likes’ and HOW that translates to sales? The disparity in the statistics above shows a stark contrast.  Marketers are relying on vanity metrics instead of focusing on the entire conversion process. 

Why is this so?

Let’s take a step back.

A ‘Like’ is essentially a sticker of affirmation that someone is interested in your brand or that you have somethingthat appeals to them. That doesn’t mean they will actually buy your product, advocate and support your initiatives, nor do anything further beyond clicking the ‘Like’ button.

SO WHAT REALLY ARE ‘LIKES’?  Something not quite marketing, not quite advertising, not quite branding and not quite PR.  In a world where points win prizes, what is the prize for a ‘Like’? Facebook’s media currency of choice certainly has value - $100bn worth.

Bringing this back to the ‘Likes’ and the sales conversion process: as a marketer, what are your priorities when your company (or product) posts a status update on any of the social networks? Are you generating ‘white noise’, potentially causing brand friction, pollution or even confusion?

There are just too many companies out there looking for ‘Likes’ because as one client said, “Many ‘Likes’ is cool! It seems as though we are the market leader.”  As social media consultants, whilst we like to see big numbers of ‘clicks’, ‘tweets’, ‘Likes’, ‘pins’ , we are more concerned about metrics that count, such as engagement rate, conversion rate, reach and impression, frequency, PR and increased traffic in-store or online.

Unless that ‘Like’ is attributable (directly or indirectly) to your bottom line, having a million followers doesn’t matter.  I’d rather have only 500 active fans that are engaged and conversing, sharing their thoughts, giving feedback (both positive and negative), than 50,000 disengaged clones.  These influencers are your brand ambassadors, focus group, target audience and biggest critics.  They are the ones who will make the conversion happen, and drive others to your product and ultimately to sales.

The message, as always, is that quality trumps quantity.  Having many low-quality ‘Likes’ does not necessarily bring any business value.  They are vanity metrics that do not increase your revenue.  So whilst ‘Likes’ are nice, your social media strategy should focus on getting advocates, building rapport, and then seeing ‘Likes’ translate to sales. Now that is a measurement to reckon with!

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Organic Facebook Reach Throttle: The Good News for Brands

If you know what organic Facebook Reach is, you’ve probably already heard that Facebook is throttling the results for brands.  This doesn’t mean that they’re turning it off entirely, but if this Valleywag article is to be believed, your brand’s content will now only reach 1-2% of your followers.  (If you want to know more about Reach or why our Swedish Facebook expert thinks it’s the most important metric on Facebook, the hyperlinked article will help you out.)

To put it simply, Facebook Reach is the same thing as “impressions” in a traditional media source.  It’s the number of people exposed to your content – and it’s how you get Engagement (and on Facebook, Engagement’s by-product is word-of-mouth marketing).  In the past, Reach was earned media: we were able to get those eyeballs in the Newsfeeds of the folks who Liked us on Facebook, simply by posting content on our own owned media (our Page).  And the more people who engaged with the content, the more other folks saw it – not just through the shares and their specific activity feeds (which is more earned media for us, i.e. the holy grail of social media marketing), but because Facebook Story Bumping rewards content marketing engagement by keeping popular content up at the top of relevant user Newsfeeds.

1) Pay for placement.

2) Engage good influencers, and they will share your content.

And the truth of the matter is that both of these tactics force us to be better at content marketing.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Organic Facebook Reach – It Ain’t Free Anymore

This is what everyone is moaning about: yep, Facebook wants us to pay for real estate that we used to get for free.  And, to be fair to the brands here, Facebook has put on a real dog and pony show over the past several years to convince companies that building up their followers is a great idea and that the big payoff is the earned media that we were getting in those Newsfeeds.

That being the case, Facebook has somewhat pulled the rug out from under the brands.  This could have been handled better from a communications standpoint.

The reality, though, is that all free rides are bound to end.  Facebook is a business, and it’s going to monetize wherever it can.  The big question that brands are going to have to ask themselves now is whether or not they’ve seen enough evidence that Facebook as a marketing channel is actually worth a spend; Facebook, obviously, feels that its value has been proven.

Now, whether that $200 was worth 4500 to reach is up to them to decide; this was an awareness campaign and their metrics are up to them.  Doing a spend on Promoted Posts is advertising, friends, and while we have more tracking on this spend as compared to a billboard campaign, unless you’re actually prompting a click you’re taking a leap of faith that brand awareness is a worthy endeavor.  (The social marketing ROI post explains that, too.)

ut there is a truth that we marketers who are bummed out by this change  need to admit to ourselves:

Marketers know from experience that people don’t value free things as much as they should.

And this includes us.  So, perhaps – if we’re really honest with ourselves – we’ve been a little more lax than we need to be in our own content marketing strategy.  After all, until now we could just throw up pictures of cats (um – those actually work – keep doing that) and any other thing we so chose, and if it didn’t work – *shrug.*  Facebook was great for content experimentation for that reason.  Now, we’re going to have to consider where we’re putting a spend – and that means we’ll have to start to ask ourselves questions like “Is this post worth paying money to promote?”

And, if the answer is no, perhaps the next question we should be asking ourselves is, “Then is it worth the disruption to someone’s activity feed in the first place?”

Now, perhaps I’m just overly optimistic to think that better content will come out of this change, but hey: I’m an upbeat girl.

Influencer Marketing is the New Organic Facebook Reach

In the last few months, we’ve been talking a lot about influencer marketing – and our earned social media article is now the underscore to the article you’re reading.   Now that Facebook Reach is primarily a paid advertising channel, influencer marketing becomes more important than ever: your Page’s content may not show up in your followers’ Newsfeed without your dollars, but an actual person’s content will still show up to their followers, even if it’s yours.

Using influencers in lieu of paid placement isn’t a bad thing: people are much more likely to pay attention to something that’s shared by an actual person in their network anyway, and social media marketing is a discipline that’s best done by real people acting like real people.  That being said, it is of course more work to build up a personal network of influencers and lobby for spend dollars and really track that spend and make sure that the content you’re putting out there is actually worth (1) money, or (2) an influencer’s time…

And all of that should lead to better content marketing.  And better content is never a bad thing.

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Facebook Brand Page Reach Improves Slightly in January; Still Down 30% Since November

Organic Reach Declines 30% in January Compared to November

The good news? January wasn't as bad as December.

The bad news? January was still pretty bad for organic reach, with brands seeing an average decline of 30% when compared to November.

Facebook Reach Jan 2014 down 30% from November

Rise in Number of Engaged Users

There is some good news for brands. As Facebook shows your content to fewer people, some brand pages are seeing solid growth in their total number of engaged users. Two brands in our data set saw increases north of 100% in fact, and the average was 19%, although some pages did see a decline as high as 62%.

This wasn't the case in December, where the average page in our data set saw a 20% decline in engaged users. It will be interesting to see if the January ranges continue in future months.

Facebook engaged users grew 30%

This suggests that Facebook is having some success showing branded content to those most likely to engage in it.

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Guide to Facebook Reach: What Marketers Need to Know By Emeric Ernoult

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 reachis 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, 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 topromote 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.

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How to Improve Your Facebook Engagement Using Controlled Experiments

#1: View Insights for Ideas

In your Insights section, you do have some data on your best post types (under Posts), but that can be a function of what types of content you have been posting lately. So you may not get the whole picture if you haven’t been posting many links recently. But it’s a good place to start your investigation.

Take a look at the best post types for your page.

Another good place to start is to look at the Posts section and click on one of the posts. You will get a lot of information on your individual posts. The example shown here is a photo tip, which typically does very well on my page.

Clicking on a post will give you a lot of information.

What I wanted to see is how posts did in a more controlled experiment. If I posted similar information with a link or a text post, would it do as well? Here’s an idea of how you can set up an experiment on your own page to do a little investigation.

#2: Set Up Your Experiment

Start with an outline of types of posts that you want to test and length of time. I ran two different time periods to test the number of posts per day. The longer your testing period, the better your results. But for the purpose of this post, I chose to run my test this way:

Length: Posting 5 times per day for 3 days

Types of Posts: Text, link, photo

Post times and formats:

• 6 am: Informative post with a link and a tag of another Facebook page (text post would remove the link preview, photo post would have the link in the status area)
• 9 am: Tip (link post would include a link to the tip, photo post would include a photographic representation of the tip)
• Noon: Longer post (more text, but also would include a photo or link if needed)
• 3 pm: Question
• 6 pm: Humorous post

For the second experiment I posted 3 times a day with slightly later times: 10 am, 1 pm and 7 pm.

If you’re going to be a purist about this testing, you would post the same information each time and vary the post type each time. But that might not be so fun for your fans.

Once you’ve done your posts, you should wait a day to allow for all the results and then you can start assembling your data.

First, download your post-level data in your Facebook Insights area. Click Export Data, then select your date range and make sure you’ve selected the Post-level data button.

Download your post-level data.

Now you’re going to need to gather the data on four different tabs of the Excel spreadsheet.

Use the different tabs on the Excel spreadsheet to see the data.

#3: Gather the Data

I wanted to know about comments, likes and shares, as well as the clicks, reach and hides for each post. I found that information on each of these tabs within the spreadsheet:

• Lifetime Talking About This: Comments, likes and shares
• Key Metrics: Reach
• Lifetime Post Consumers by Type: Clicks
• Lifetime Negative Feedback: Hides and unlikes

One thing to note on the Lifetime Post Consumers by Type is that you’ll see Link Clicks, Other Clicks and Photo Views. The Other Clicks incorporate when someone clicks anywhere on the post that isn’t the photo or the link—they may click on the headline, the text in the status area or on a See More link if you have a long post.

And a note on the Lifetime Negative Feedback: You’ll have a column for Unlikes of Your Page and the “xbutton_clicks”, which is the Hide button. I take the sum of these columns since they have a similar effect—the person is not consuming your content in the news feed anymore.

Now put these statistics into one spreadsheet so you can compare.

Assemble the data into one spreadsheet.

Sum up the days of data so that you can see what type of post “won” the day.Highlight the winners for each day. Obviously in terms of reach, you may be seeing the same people for each post, but it still equates to potential eyeballs on your posts.

#4: Draw Some Conclusions

From this data, you may see patterns. One thing that’s obvious is that the status updates are the best at comments, likes, reach and other clicks for the two posting schedules. So I need to keep that in mind when doing my posting. But I did see that the link posts did OK in the reach for their posting schedules. I’m not sure how the link posts got photo views in the second round of testing so that was unusual.

The other thing you can do is compare the time slots between the posts and see if a certain type of post does better in one time slot. I noticed that the midday photo posts seemed to perform well compared to the other times during the day that I posted photos. After running this experiment, I might make sure my midday post has a photo.

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