According to the latest reports released by GroupM Next and various other Facebook analytics agencies, brand pages have seen a 38% dip in their Facebook post reach after the recent changes to Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm in September.
Though Facebook claims otherwise. According to their data, the average reach of brand pages has been steady. The debate continues with many alleging Facebook of curbing the reach of post by brand pages in its new algorithm to encourage promoted posts and Facebook advertisements.
Lets look at some basics of Facebook news feed before deciding the right tactics. A Facebook post or an 'Edge' appears in a user's news feed on the basis of its EdgeRank. Based on the publicly available information until now, EdgeRank is a factor of following three parameters:
- Affinity - It is the measure of closeness between the user and the post.
- Weight - Measure of engagement on the post (likes, comments, shares etc.) and type of post (text, image, video, link etc.).
- Time - Measure of recency of the post.
The news feed product manager of Facebook recently also announced a 4th factor effecting the EdgeRank, which is the number of complaints or hides your posts receive by users. How the EdgeRank varies based on these parameters is still not clear and the algorithm keeps changing.
While going through the analytics of our Facebook pages sometime back, I realized that the reach and engagement of posts has decreased since September and also is the rate of organic likes. After reading a couple of blogs it seemed Facebook is penalizing the page after its new algorithm release, for posts being hidden or marked as spam by users. However after further analyzing the data and experimentation, we were able to observe a exponential increase in the reach and engagement of specific type posts. To our surprise these were the plain text posts.
There was a 40-60% decrease in the reach of photo, video and link posts. While there was a 30% increase the reach of plain text posts. Thus the reach for plain text posts was on average 3 times of the photo, video and link posts. Worst hit among these were the Link posts, which saw a 70% decrease in reach. One thing was clear after seeing these numbers that Facebook has modified its algorithm to suppress brand page posts, containing links of their websites or promotional images and videos. Facebook feels users will find plain status updates more engaging than links, pics and videos, and thus has increased EdgeRank for plain text posts by giving them a higher weight as explained above.
As a result, we started posting more of text posts and saw direct exponential increase in average reach and engagement of the page. But the best part was a 300% increase in the rate of gaining organic likes. This doesn't mean, we stopped sharing articles from our website completely, as plain text posts limit the actions that user can take if he finds the post engaging. The ideal strategy would be to restrict the number of link/photo/video posts on your page to 15-20% of the total posts in a day. Again the ideal number total posts in a day is subjective to the type of page. It can be as low as 1-2 for a FMCG brand page to as high as 10-15 for pages providing news and information.
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| Image Courtsey: GroupM Next |
As a result, we started posting more of text posts and saw direct exponential increase in average reach and engagement of the page. But the best part was a 300% increase in the rate of gaining organic likes. This doesn't mean, we stopped sharing articles from our website completely, as plain text posts limit the actions that user can take if he finds the post engaging. The ideal strategy would be to restrict the number of link/photo/video posts on your page to 15-20% of the total posts in a day. Again the ideal number total posts in a day is subjective to the type of page. It can be as low as 1-2 for a FMCG brand page to as high as 10-15 for pages providing news and information.
Most importantly what I can derive from all these observations is that you cannot rely on Facebook as single source of digital marketing or driving traffic to your website. As its quite likely that Facebook will keep changing its rules of content consumption and it'll never allow it to be used as a open/free marketing or distribution platform.
