If you have a business fan page, you want those fans to see your posts, right? Well, the chart above shows that fan page owners are grossly overestimating how many people they’re reaching through posts.
(Note: That chart based on pages that together represent more than 400 million fans; it was complied by PageLever, which is in beta and growing its data set. The PageLever charts rock (they’re much cooler than my lame MS Powerpoint table above), and if you want better Facebook Page insights, you should sign up for their beta. The “approximate % of fans seeing posts daily” and “total daily impressions per fan” columns are daily, so these numbers are affected by pages that are not posting daily.)
It’s more of a shocker than you thought, isn’t it? Among Facebook pages with a million likers or more, less than three percent of their fans are seeing their posts daily.
Most Fan Pages Are Under-Performing
I’ve been told that HubSpot recommends a 0.5 percent feedback rate as a goal. But I have seen pages up to several hundred thousand fans achieve feedback rates above one percent regularly when they post purposely to get likes and comments. It may be possible for multi-million fan pages as well.
If you aren’t thinking about how to get more likes and comments, you probably don’t understand how EdgeRank is reducing your visibility to your fans.
Keeping your fans engaged daily and arousing their desire for your offering must be part of your fan page strategy, or you’re wasting the opportunity to stay visible and get sales.
There may be cases where a one percent feedback rate is not possible, especially if your fans don’t have much in common that they’re passionate about. This is more likely the case for fan pages that prioritize high fan counts ahead of targeting good potential customers. But you can see from the numbers above that high fan counts are deceiving.
Many Are Under-Posting
A lot of experts recommend posting to your Facebook fan page daily. But many are not achieving that. This is a missed opportunity. It’s similar to how so many companies have email lists but no email marketing strategy beyond a monthly newsletter than no one cares about. You need a fan page posting plan.
Afraid to post daily? To give you a contrary example, one e-commerce website I know of has found their 90,000 fan Facebook page to be quite profitable, and they post five times per day and have done so for more than six months.
Four daily posts are engagement-oriented and one is sales-oriented. Not all the Facebook e-commerce efforts I’m aware of are making profits, so it’s interesting that this profitable one is posting so often. Perhaps by being so aggressive, they cultivate the most passionate fans and weed out the ones who are never going to buy.
Facebook fan quantity is overrated. You do need a lot of fans, but you need a lot of quality fans, and you need to keep them engaged. The best Facebook marketers are engaging their fans with a purpose while growing their fan base.
But Can Big Pages Stop Growing Fans?
An underestimated factor in EdgeRank is time decay. One of the reasons so many fans of the biggest pages are not engaged is because they became fans so long ago. Some huge fan pages were not started by the company, and the early fans may never have been engaged. If a fan hasn’t clicked on one of your posts for a year, there may be almost no chance they’ll ever see your posts again.
And if you continue to do a poor job with your post feedback rate, over time, your fans will continue decay. You’ll have to keep getting new fans, as they get more and more expensive (because of ad burnout, they always become more expensive).
Once the cost is prohibitive, you’ll have no choice but to pay for sponsored post story ads to your existing fan base to try to re-awaken them. If you have more than 100,000 fans, you should already be running sponsored post stories and other ads to your existing fan base to keep them engaged, especially if your feedback rate is below 0.5 percent.
Solutions: Here’s The Good News
I was very reluctant to put this post out — it’s cool that it has an attention-grabbing title and it’s based on real data, but it could be discouraging to many involved in Facebook marketing. There are many naysayers about this business, so why add fuel to the fire?
In my experience, the people who say Facebook doesn’t work for business have little experience and no training. I agree with them that not enough businesses are succeeding, but I see it as a function of companies not doing it well, not as a function of the social network itself.
Consider this a tough-love post. I want you to face the facts and change your tactics so you can get better results.
Here’s what you need to change:
- Have a plan for engaging your fans: Who’s going to do the posting? Do they have any experience in this? How often will they post? Have you planned out 30 to 90 daily posts yet?
- Go for likes and comments: Without them, you don’t get visibility. If you’re not getting a one percent feedback rate, have you been trained how to get more likes and comments from posts?
- Grow targeted fans that are realistically good potential buyers for your company: Don’t just go for numbers. The businesses I’ve seen make money from Facebook grew all or most of their fans from Facebook advertising, which gives you powerful targeting options.
Readers, what do you think of this advice?
Brian Carter is the chief executive officer of the FanReach Facebook marketing training company, a social media trainer, and a Facebook and AdWords consultant.
My bet is that a lot of people are like me. I am on FB all day, but almost never glance at my Newsfeed. When I do, it isn't for long, but I have hundreds of items to go through. I know I am not seeing everything that I should be and have missed interesting or promotional materials I wanted to see as a result.
So, is the answer really posting more? For me, probably not. But at least part of the answer is titles. I am drawn to catchy, witty, pun-ny titles that make my brain go "hmmmm". You can almost always catch me with a good title if it is still on my home page.
The second fix is really in FB's hands. I really really need some way to weed out all the noise so I can see what interests me most. Some better tools to filter that newsfeed would be great. And yes, I already use several avenues to filter the feed and it is still unmanageable. A real filter, for keywords, would be awesome. And pages using those keywords in titles, of course.
Comment by Kadiya — June 21, 2011 @ 1:06 pm
"The best Facebook marketers are engaging their fans with a purpose while growing their fan base." Great advice! Thanks for posting this!
Comment by Katie — June 21, 2011 @ 1:15 pm
This post got my attention in Twitter and it's very useful information. I like how you present the "worst case" and then follow up with solutions. As an online mag owner who is trying to get a handle on Facebook optimization this was a needed wake-up call.
Comment by @toquemag — June 21, 2011 @ 1:33 pm
I think the answer is to have professional social media managers that know how to ask questions and create content to engage people, or at least be really smart about the content you post. Look at Vin Diesel's Facebook page. There's a lot of raw authenticity there and people definitely respect that and interact with him. A lot of people are using Facebook fans services as reviewed at http://www.buyfacebookfansreviews.com and getting a lot of extra people to like their page but many companies don't have any idea how to communicate with their fans, and it shows through some of these dreadful stats above. I think that vin Diesel's Facebook page really took off because he is hilarious and authentic and doesn't care about showing his emotional side. I think a lot of people can learn a lot by just watching his interaction with his fans and I think that more companies that care about Facebook and Twitter should devote more attention to getting really smart people to manage their social media accounts.
Comment by Martha Westerman — June 21, 2011 @ 2:25 pm
Hey Brian, this is a great post! I know people don't want to hear about this but it's so true. Many Pages are under-performing. All your points are spot on and I especially like your comment that "you need a lot of quality fans, and you need to keep them engaged." So incredibly true!
Comment by Madalyn Sklar — June 21, 2011 @ 2:38 pm
Scary stats, but certainly important for people to become aware of. Reality is brands have a hard enough time getting their "edgerank" to perform well if they do things right and those still blasting unwanted updates, over posting, or focusing on "sell sell sell" are really missing out on opportunity to impact [and thus sell too] more of their users.
As you put it, we all need to be focusing on our interactions, relevancy and most of all, a plan to insure it gets there.
Comment by @teds027 — June 21, 2011 @ 2:41 pm
Amazing article. I personally have a 25k site, and we post 5 times a day. No problem with people feeling saturated since they are passionate about the page thematic.
Comment by Jon — June 21, 2011 @ 2:49 pm
In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research.
WrapMail can also be used to create personal email stationary based on their social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace) hobbies, interests etc for anyone’s personal email.
Wrapmail is available for free at http://www.wrapmail.com and wrapped emails arrive with no red x!
Comment by wrapmail — June 21, 2011 @ 3:00 pm
I have bee following the advice in your articles since starting my fan page 1-1/2 months ago and it has been working! Of course, you need a little creativity and out-of-box thinking to maximize the results but your articles have been valuable in helping me to formulate those ideas. Thank you!!!
Comment by --SY — June 21, 2011 @ 3:26 pm
This is hard information to swallow especially for a new small business thinking about getting started with a Facebook Page. How do you convince them that months and months of effort will be worth it?
I think this is why you hear that w/o at least 500 fans your Page is going nowhere. I'm at just under 200 and average just over 1% feedback. I didn't know this was remarkable, however, I did know that it was above average. I have never advertised for fans. I do teach social media and marketing to small business owners among other services. The people who are most engaged with my Page are generally current and past clients. It's organic growth that's working for me. I post 1-2x a day and do try to mix it up and rarely directly sell. I plan to ratchet up the selling posts as I hit 4 – 500 Likes.
Comment by Michael Neuendorff — June 22, 2011 @ 1:36 am
excellent post! will be sharing it with my twitter followers and clients!
Comment by @nettaP — June 22, 2011 @ 11:26 am
Excellent post, and great advice. It's amazing that some sites still don't understand the concept of engagement, and that they still speak like a press release.
Comment by John Porcaro — June 22, 2011 @ 12:36 pm
The bottom line is that there is no cookie cutter strategy for companies to engage on Facebook. There needs to be a lot of thought and effort put into it, and like all marketing, a fair amount of testing to find out what works for your target audience. Thanks for the thought-provoking post!
Comment by Stephanie Chandler — June 22, 2011 @ 1:26 pm
I wonder how new these numbers are and if they have anything to do with the way Facebook has chosen to deliver the newsfeed posts? I've seen a big drop off in commenting in the past three months even though i'm posting at the same level.
Comment by @Cynthialil — June 22, 2011 @ 1:31 pm
Twitter and Linkedin are much useful compared to Facebook….
Comment by Kent — June 22, 2011 @ 2:13 pm
Excellent post! It also highlights the importance of engaging your audience through both email and social media marketing. I think most of us are past the social vs. email debate. The reality is that its best when your customers & prospects both like you on Facebook and opt-into your email newsletter. Email is still the best way to get your message heard and social is one of the best ways to get your message shared. A smart tactic is to hit up your audience in their inbox with a call to action to engage on your Facebook page. Its a great way to feed the algorithm and therefore increase the likelihood that your post will show up in their feed. At Constant Contact, we like to say that "Email lights the fire and social fans the flames.
Comment by @mschmulen — June 23, 2011 @ 11:11 pm
Since your table starts at 1,000 fans, I wonder if the rate is higher for smaller fan pages like mines
)
Interesting article though. The thing is, that facebook does not give the user a way to control/filter what is shown in his timeline and no decent way to search through it. I more than once heared users complain that posts of fan pages they are a fan of are not shown in their personal timeline. Or they wonder, what to do, so posts of a fanpage appear in their main news timeline. And may be there is a reason why FB does not offer a better functionality: they want to earn more money by selling more adds (adds that remind users of their favorite brand and makes them go to the fanpage).
Comment by Eva Schumann — June 24, 2011 @ 9:51 am
Facebook brand communities should serve as a "brand-hub" for most brands and marketers. The consumers should know where to go when they want to reach out for their favorite brand, with good or bad news and also should provide the brand as an immediate reach platform for their brand loyal consumers. How a brand does this, truly defines these numbers above.
Comment by Judit Nagy — June 24, 2011 @ 3:11 pm
Good article. Like @Rihanna recently posted "numbers don't lie" But averages blur the story. I.e, 10+ million GUNSNROSES FB page gets 30-40% impressions. timing and content -RULE!
Comment by @NickyChips — June 28, 2011 @ 4:38 pm
[...] all rosy as the value from acquiring Facebook fans may have diminishing returns. On average, under 10 percent of a brand’s fans see any given post on a page. As the number of pages that consumers like grows, exposure to a [...]
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[...] Want some tips you can put into immediate action, straight from the first conference devoted exclusively to Facebook marketing? Well I have those tips, because I took really good notes during the conference sponsored by this very blog in San Francisco last week; tweets about AF Expo generated 1,463,854 impressions, reaching an audience of 392,225 followers, according to Alan K’necht. Wowza. [...]
Pingback by 20 Essential Facebook Marketing Tips From AF Expo — July 5, 2011 @ 10:56 am
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Comment by entopizo — July 9, 2011 @ 10:23 am
[...] its EdgeRank numbers through the roof. If you have a business on Facebook, have a plan for engaging fans. Get more likes and comments. Determine whether your page is getting a one percent feedback [...]
Pingback by 6 Facebook Ad Tricks For Competitive ‘Mad Men’ Types — July 11, 2011 @ 10:22 am
[...] If you’re not a complete Facebook beginner, you know you need a good Feedback rate (more likes and comments on your posts) to stay visible to your fans. We’ve already used PageLever data to show that a shockingly low percentage of fans see most pages’ posts. [...]
Pingback by 6 Ways Facebook Analytics Ninjas Get Mega-Likes — August 8, 2011 @ 11:42 am
My perspective comes through a public relations lens. A FB post is a direct pitch to a reader — without the value added by a media journalist (polish, editing, headlines). So, the page owner needs to do the work of the journalist & editor. Headline, copy and photo are extremely important.
Also, I find that it's more engaging (from the FB stats) to keep the content on the same section. Making users click through to another site is like asking a NYTimes reader to close their app and go to another app (or section of the paper).
Comment by Lisa LaMagna — August 9, 2011 @ 1:31 pm
Thanks for the info. One thing that's not 100% clear to me regarding the phrase "Seeing Posts Daily": is this in a user's 'Most Recent' newsfeed? Or the 'Top News' one?
Would be great to have more info from the guys at Pagelever.
Comment by @grrRAAK — August 16, 2011 @ 6:49 am
Great question–it actually covers both newsfeeds, so it's not "how did they see it" or "how many do we estimate will see it" but rather "how many actually saw it through any method".
I explained our methodology in more detail here:
http://pagelever.com/fan-pages-impressions-pagevi...
Cheers,
Jeff – PageLever cofounder
Comment by Jeff Widman — August 16, 2011 @ 2:07 pm
It does take quite a lot of effort to try and come up with something new to post everyday. If you have a topic for each day of the week though it enables you to cover 7 topics across each week and keep it fresh. It makes it easier to come up with stuff to post then.
Comment by Trevor — August 26, 2011 @ 4:48 pm
especially those who follow your foot steps and gestures over the web are the granted to all facebook
Comment by Mustafa — August 31, 2011 @ 10:34 am
Great post, thank you. Am I understand your figures well: If I have 20 000 fans, will I get 4 times more visitors than I having 10 000 fans?
Comment by hirek — October 17, 2011 @ 2:59 pm
Excellent post! Just a question: isn't more important the time in which you post than to post daily?
Comment by @etta_silvi — October 27, 2011 @ 6:30 am
I just want people to comment on my facebook fan page. I have had 7 people like it and just started yesterday so I am very happy but also when I've liked someone's page, I don't see their content, their updates on that page. Why is that? How do I make sure my "fans" are seeing what I put on my facebook fan page? Thanks
Comment by Emma — November 4, 2011 @ 4:52 am
Thank you for the post, I will try to post most often and offer more giveaways to my audience. http://www.facebook.com/primitivetree
Comment by kerri foley — November 7, 2011 @ 6:10 pm
ha ha… funny post…. Really sometimes it's a shock when we see such posts on our wall – no no hair removal
Comment by marandamoses — November 22, 2011 @ 8:44 am
This article shows a misunderstanding of how "pages" work on facebook. Every time I like a page, it doesn't mean that I want to necessarily read every post they've got to make. Facebook encourages you to add your favourite films, books, tv shows and music to your profile. This is achieved in the form of page-likes but that isn't entirely obvious. You might have thought you're just declaring your appreciation for a particular band, but no, you're subscribing at the same time to their page feed. For example, I like the film Pulp Fiction, so I marked it in my movies. It's a 17 year old film though, what am I expecting to learn from it's page every day? Of course I unsubscribed to the updates, as I did with 99% of the pages I've liked.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that these statistics are so low. It's only the hard-core fans of something that want to hear everything that there is to be heard about it/them.
Comment by Snoody — November 30, 2011 @ 3:06 am
wow
nice information
for me
Comment by animal rainforest — December 4, 2011 @ 8:37 am
You might have thought you're just declaring your appreciation for a particular band, but no, you're subscribing at the same time to their page feed. For example, I like the film Pulp Fiction,
komodo-dragons
komodo-dragons
Comment by plants rainforest — December 6, 2011 @ 9:44 am
Like a most things, the key to facebook success seems to be in the consistency of the posts which is where a lot people (me included) fall down.
trynono
Comment by mumof4boys — December 12, 2011 @ 8:24 pm
I think if you cater to your fans, they know you as a trusted source and they in turn seek out your information by themselves going to your page.
Comment by Webmaster — December 13, 2011 @ 7:28 pm
I knew something was wrong! I have not been able to get even a comment on my Facebook Fan Page posts! I keep trying to get my fans to engage but have been unsuccessful. I will try using sponsored stories for my fans. I think FB is a business and they want us to have to pay for advertising. It's not as free as everyone likes to think lol. Thanks for sharing this it really brought clarity to what is going on on FB.
Comment by April Marie Tucker — December 15, 2011 @ 8:24 am
Thanks for the tips. I plan on implementing your ideas and hope that gets more comments on my fan page.
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Comment by yen — February 8, 2012 @ 9:30 pm
Thanks for posting this. I manage a lot of FB Pages, one that has over 250K fans. Whenever I posted a wall update, our reach was between 45-65,000 fans. Suddenly, on Nov. 14, the reach (impressions) plummeted to between 3K-5K for each post. I use best practices, analyze everything from time of day, to day of week, to type of post. I changed tactics, I tried with photos, and without photos.
Nothing changes.
Until…I invested in Page Post Ads. Aha! Pay to play is the solution.
Facebook is obviously having a hard time dealing with the firehose of content on the platform and trying to figure out a way to manage it. Why would a business invest the time and money to grow a page fan base when the fans never get to see the messaging? And I feel that users are going to get fed up with seeing only a few brand messages out of all the ones they've asked to see.
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