Why Not To Get Angry About Facebook’s Promoted Posts

Angela Brown says:

Edgerank, really a helpful tool for Facebook marketing. Thanks for nice sharing.

18. 6. 2012 at 10:13 am

Giovanni says:

As a user, Facebook has compromised my user experience a lot. My timeline is full of promoted ads that I don’t care about and I can’t block a page from showing. If my friends liked the page, it’s entitled to show in my timeline. Even if I unsubscribe from this friend, the promoted ads still show every day. Should I unfriend them? I think that was the point of the whole subscription thing.

6. 7. 2012 at 3:15 pm

Nathan says:

I hate this feature for my business. We have spent thousands over the past year increasing our business’s FB page likes, and this is wrong:

“What has caused the most contention is the misunderstanding that Facebook are now holding your regular posts/updates from your subscribers and only showing them to a limited few. This is not the case – your regular posts go out to the same amount of people as ever. The critical point is that it never was the case that all your subscribers saw all your updates. ”

This is actually the case. One of my pages now has 8,800 followers/likers. In January-March, our total was around 4,000. We post as often (if not more) now in October 2012, than we did back then. Running the statistics from the site shows the following:

From January-June 2012: Average Weekly Total Reach was around 68,000 people.

From July-August 2012: Average Weekly Total Reach was around 6,000 people.

From September 2012-Present: Average Weekly Total Reach is about 3,000 people.

With more page likes than ever, how can anyone from facebook claim that just as many feeds are getting through to subscribers as did before? What is the point of the thousands we spent advertising? Customers signed up because they wanted to see our stories in their news feed. They can always unlike or subscribe. So, what is the point of facebook if we have to repeatedly spend again and again to reach the same customers?

I guess it is time to use other social networks, email, and avenues where a lot of funds aren’t washed down the toilet.

10. 10. 2012 at 7:46 pm

Craig Charley says:

Hi Nathan, when we wrote about posts having the same reach as before we meant without advertising. People wrongly assumed that their (pre-promoted posts) content was going out to 100% of their followers, which it never has and never will on any social network.

Interestingly, we have also seen a decline in (unpaid) reach recently, but a good 3 months since the actual update. I’m inclined to believe this is as much to do with the ‘Edgerank’ algorithm as anything else.

What confuses me is that you talk about spending thousands on advertising but are still losing reach, which totally depends on your budget and CPC – Facebook tells you how many people you will reach based on your budget. As with any paid advertising, if your ROI doesn’t work out you should start doing something differently. In the periods you talk about, have you kept a consistent advertising campaign running or have you chopped and changed? If you run paid ads in January but not September, you can definitely expect to lose reach.

As for losing reach from non-promoted posts, do pay attention to engagement. If you are posting lots of content but not getting likes, comments or shares then Facebook’s Edgerank is going to decide that your followers don’t really want to see what you post.

I may be wrong, but I believe that the average reach for a non-promoted post on Facebook is around 10-20% (which I believe to be higher than Twitter for most businesses!) while a promoted post’s reach is entirely down to budget.

Hope that helps, I would be interested to find out a bit more about the numbers and the campaign as there might be a post in it! A ‘Facebook advertising doesn’t work’ case study would be fantastic.

11. 10. 2012 at 8:57 am