Seeing a Decrease in Reach on Your Facebook Fan Page? Here’s Why…

10.04.12 by Courtney Livingston | 0 Comments

If you’ve noticed a decrease in Reach (organic and viral) for your Facebook Page over the past couple of weeks, you’re not alone. Last Thursday, Social@Ogilvy announced that Facebook let them know about a change in the the Edgerank algorithm that Facebook uses to decide what a user sees in their Newsfeed. The change, launched on September 20th, aims to decrease the number of organic brand posts users see in their Newsfeeds in an effort to help “de-clutter” the Newsfeed, especially for those on mobile devices and tablets.

To follow up and see if the tweak had actually resulted in any changes for brands,  Edgerank Checker ran an analysis of 3,000 brand pages comparing data from the week before the change to the week after. They found an average of:

  • Organic Reach decreased by 25%
  • Viral Reach decreased by 45%
  • Engagement/Fan decreased by 17%
  • Virality increased by 7%

While the sample size for the study is a little small, we’re seeing similar decreases in reach for some of our clients.

Here’s a look at the kinds of changes we’re seeing for daily and weekly organic reach. We’ve plotted post frequency (number of posts each day) along with daily and weekly organic reach. So we’re able to see that posting cadence didn’t change, but before the update, this brand was reaching about 18% of their fans each day. Post-update (red line), it’s closer to 7% and trending downward.

This is a big blow to brands using Facebook to connect with fans. As Facebook continues to optimize for mobile and works to expand revenue channels, we expect to see more changes like this, which make Facebook feel like a “pay to play” space for brands.

 

Have you noticed any changed in your daily or weekly Reach numbers? Let us know in the comments (adding the % increase/decrease would be interesting, if you have it!).

 

Categories: SocialTags: edgerank, Facebook, post reach
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  • Josh Baker

    I have certainly seen a decrease in my brand reach.Many of my friends that follow my business never see the posts I make. But I get a lot of pop ups to “promote this post”. Not hard to see the math

  • Mary

    Yes we have also seen a huge decrease in numbers. We have about 7,600 fan likes and our postings are reaching 2-30 people a post verses the 300-700 per post. We have also gotten a lot of promote this post pop ups.

  • http://room214.com jasoncormier

    On the user side, I’m hearing more people complain about “suggested posts” showing up in their mobile news feeds. I imagine they wouldn’t need to see suggested posts if they could just see more of the posts from people (and brands) they are already following.

  • Richard Melick

    We used to reach around 450 to 500 of our 1700 fan base through posts on our fan page, but have seen that drop to 120 to 180 now. I am actually afraid to look at the impacted numbers as I know they have dropped as well. I understand the concept and need to make money, but they seem to be alienating the people and brands that have made Facebook such a popular platform for marketing businesses.

    It saddens me to see what was once a tool become a “pay to play” website. As a user, I feel overwhelmed more by the ads, often spending more time to hunt for the real updates from pages I do like. This is especially becoming prevelant on mobile viewing, where there seems to be a suggested page or ‘you might like’ quite a bit more often. But that may be just me focusing a bit more on my mobile than desktop. Maybe they should announce it for what it is; “we need to make up all that money we lost when we went public.”

    The concept is not anything new, and is really a digitalized form of mass mailers. Companies have to pay for these to be delivered, but the difference is that those are physical forms of marketing. Does the value of the ‘paid’ posts truly deliver on the ROI for a company? Why should I have to pay $10 to deliver to all my 1700 fans when a company like Audi USA has almost 6 million fans and the same cost for delivery?

    Jason – As fewer and fewer people are impacted by brands that they love, do you feel there is there going to be an exodous of these members over to a new platform? With that, do you feel that with the new pay-to-play format, companies are going to have to readjust how they approach their social marketing budget to account for pay for delivery?
    I have a lot of questions, I know.

    • http://about.me/celivingston Courtney Livingston

      Thanks for your feedback, Richard. You have some really great points.

      I don’t think people will leave Facebook just because they aren’t hearing from their favorite brands. I think there’s already some social splintering going on, where younger folks are flocking to sites away from their parents (Twitter, Instagram – even though technically owned by FB) and as people get more into online communities, they’re also finding themselves more drawn to niche networks like Pinterest and Reddit. Additionally, Google is integrating Google+ into damn near everything now, so it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore.

      I’m not putting an expiration date on Facebook, but I feel like it’s approaching a saturation point (at least in the US), so depending on who your target demographic is, it may be better to go after them on a platform that they’re moving TO, not FROM.

      I do believe that companies will absolutely need to readjust their budgets. If they want to stay relevant on Facebook and they’re seeing returns from those ad spends, they’re going to have to pay for that. It’s disappointing for brands who have been doing this for free for a few years now, but it’s a reality and one of the dangers of building a community on a platform you don’t own.

      I agree with you…the user and brand experiences have changed a ton and I’m not sure thats totally in a good way. It will be interesting to see how things change as FB continues to roll out “overly commercial” feeling features like Collections.