Recently, we looked at 3,000 publisher/media companies’ Facebook pages to analyze performance over the last year. We see significant and widespread changes for media companies’ content on Facebook and have heard first hand from many of our clients that they are seeing Facebook metrics fall over the past few months.
WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW TO SEE THE DATA AND GET THE ANALYSIS
SocialFlow’s Mark White and Jim Anderson discuss Media Companies’ Reach on Facebook in our Facebook LIve Chat on June 2, 2016
Looking at Reach and Reach per post, after growing success late last year and in the beginning of this year, average reach fell pretty sharply since February. Since then, media companies have had to increase quantity of their posts to achieve the same level of reach. Overall, we had seen a 42% drop of Reach per post.
It is no surprise that this decline correlates with a major revision to the Facebook algorithm. Facebook is constantly adjusting their algorithms to tune the types of content that they want to surface to the user. Once they changed the algorithm earlier this year, media companies’ content suffered.
What can publishers and media companies do to combat this? Our data is based on 3,000+ media companies pages and their Facebook activity. It is important to evaluate your own individual experience (as a publisher). If you find that your Reach has plummeted, it may be time to start (or continue to) experiment with different types of Facebook content and see which brings the greatest success. Facebook will continue to adjust their algorithms, so there is no silver bullet, but being aware, and knowing the difference between declining results due to Facebook adjustments and declining results on their own is important.
Read more about this:
Financial Times: “Facebook Algorithm Shift Hits Media Groups”
MediaPost: “Publishers’ Facebook Audiences Plunge”
The Wall Street Journal: “CMO Roundup”
AdWeek: “Publisher Reach on Facebook is Down 42% The ‘pretty notable drop’ happened over the past 5 months”
The Irish Times: “Shift in Facebook Algorithm limits reach of media stories”
