I was recently asked by client, whose Facebook business page I manage, why her fans were not seeing her posts. A very fair question, she assumed, as do most folks, that when you post to your business page that your fans – all of them – will see the post. Sorry to be a buzzkill…but that is not true.
Facebook uses an algorithm called Edgerank to determine which of your fans will see your posts on their news feeds. Without Edgerank we would be overwhelmed with content – yes, Facebook manage what content you see via Edgerank which uses 3-factors to determine post priority
- Affinity – how close is your relationship determined by activity
- Weight – the type of content – photo content, status update, photo comment etc
- Time – a measure of recent activity
Facebook estimates that only 16% (source: SEOMoz) of fans will see your posts. I have a pretty active photography Facebook for my photography business (Website and Facebook ) and I will share my Insight data, as follows:
Sports Photography by George Ross Insights
I have 695 Fans (with a potential of 241,690 through Friends of Friends) but in the last week I had had a total reach of 6,566, with a high of 7,300. Pretty good but, as always, the devil is in the detail because the weekly statistics are cumulative. The next chart depicts the analytics for individual posts
Sports Photography by George Ross Insights, Individual Posts
First of all it should be noted that my ‘Reach’ exceed the average of 16% because as photographer I have visual content which gets passed around Facebook and drives up my numbers. Think about that when you make a post….how many of your fans will help you market your business? While the reach numbers are better than average what we really want is to increase the number of engage users (the fans that will actually click on your post). An interesting observation here is that the two top posts with only 8 engage users were ‘text’ only posts whereas the other two posts were photos…..
All of that said, how does my client make sure her posts are seen by all of her fans?….is that possible?
Yes it is but at a cost. Facebook recently introduced ‘Promoted Posts’ and the state ” our promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post.”
So, if you are unhappy with the performance of your Facebook Business Page….you have a choice….Promoted Posts. ( A new element for your marketing plan)
