With more brands turning to Facebook as a way to reach their audiences, Gavin Sinden looks at practical ways you can ensure more of your brand’s posts get seen by fans and their wider circles of friends.
Facebook has changed the nature of social media marketing. Its unstoppable rise to become the dominant consumer platform means all marketers need a deep understanding of how to apply best practice – and overcome the pitfalls many brands tumble into.
As a consumer, your first experience of a brand starts with seeing content in your Newsfeed or through a sponsored story. As a marketer, by understanding the process that gets the content there, you’re better placed to become a smart social media marketer.
When you see stories in your newsfeed most people (and most brand managers) don’t realize that Facebook prioritizes what appears. You don’t see everything that friends or brands publish, but only a tiny portion that Facebook “chooses” to share with you. Getting nervous? You should be…
Facebook said in May that only 16% of a brand’s posts are seen by its fans – however studies by agencies since then have seen this number fall significantly. Social Bakers did a recent review, which found the following levels of reach depending on the size of your Facebook fan base:
What governs the chances of your post, status update, photo, brand “like”, etc. (Facebook calls them all “Edges”) being visible, is an algorithm called Edgerank. This is an algorithm that is calculated for every individual every time they log in to Facebook and combines three elements:
- Affinity Score – how often you react (comment, click, like) to a brand or friend’s posts.
- Edge Weight – not all edges are equal. Broadly a comment is more important than a like, a photo more important than a comment. This is customized by the user, depending on the sort of content they engage with.
- Time Decay – Newer posts are more likely to be higher up the Newsfeed. Again this is customized to an individual by how often they log into their Facebook page and when they last logged in.
In an interview Mark Zuckerburg the CEO of Facebook said that people were finding the algorithm “too spooky” in guessing what they would be interested in. So a random element was introduced, so that alongside the top “Edgerank content” any story could pop to the top. However (according to information from Edgerank.net) this random element is a small minority of the content that appears in your Newsfeed.
This means that unless a consumer is VERY engaged with a brand, regularly viewing and posting content, then it is unlikely that content produced by the brand will surface on their Newsfeeds naturally. This means that normal Facebook posts only address core brand fans that are likely to be reached through multiple methods (on pack, website, etc.). To move beyond the 5-10% of fans likely to be reached through organic posts, brands have to spend money on Facebook advertising to ensure their content is seen.
The chances of your fans’ friends being able to see those fans engage with the brand in their newsfeeds is even more unlikely. This means that sponsored stories are the only way to really promote your brand using your fans’ brand advocacy – often cited as the main benefit of Facebook. This moves Facebook from owned to paid media when it comes to widening consumer reach.
As a consequence brands are now facing a number of significant issues. The basic approach of posting regular content on your Facebook page – whilst an absolute necessity and a hygiene factor for any Facebook strategy – is unlikely to be enough to deliver significant value anymore. Facebook, by using Edgerank in pursuit of a better consumer experience, is forcing the marketer into conducting more Facebook paid advertising.
One element that Facebook introduced this year that may help a brand cut through is Facebook Page Post Targeting.
This enables a brand to specifically target a post at users based on:
- Gender
- Relationship Status
- Education
- Interested in
- Age
- Location
- Language
The implication is that by using Page Post targeting you can help your engagement and Edgerank for those of your fans that a particular post is targeted at. However it only seems to contribute a certain positive amount to Edgerank for that particular target group, certainly not guaranteeing visibility in the newsfeed.
Tips from the strategists
To help you get more from your digital budgets, here are a few quick tips for getting the most out of Facebook moving forward:
- Agencies need to be challenged with creating really engaging Facebook content encouraging fans to generate content with the greatest “Edge weight” (photos, videos, etc.) to heighten the chances of appearing regularly both on their fans’ newsfeeds and their fans’ friends.
- Agencies or Brand Managers who are actually posting should make sure they use Page Post Targeting to help hit the bull’s-eye target group.
- Facebook is one of the most powerful advertising platforms, but it will require a paid component of any strategy to make it work. Brands need to work with their media and social partners to ensure integrated strategies are developed. These will combine all the areas of Facebook across Paid, Owned and Earned media techniques to deliver the best possible ROMI.
- Track your successes: use your analytics to track the success of what’s working, so you can ensure your digital marketing just gets smarter and smarter over time, and your messages spread further through your consumers’ social networks.
- Track what works and what works best: Look back at your last 3 months of conversation starters and visual postings. Identify the top 10-20% of posts in terms of the level of engagement through the comments, shares and likes that they get. Then identify the weakest 10-20%. Look for the patterns to identify the topic areas, type of post and timing that is getting the best results – that’s how you optimise social media. Use this to brief your team and your agency more effectively in the future.
Further Facebook resources:
Best Facebook fan pages
A selection of our favourite fan pages written up as simple case studies
News about marketing on Facebook
Regular news on latest developments at Facebook
Social media marketing tips
Additional tips in the social media marketing classroom at the Digital Training Academy