Facebook's Post Reach Falls Like A Rock

Facebook is the largest social network by far with over 1.3 billion users, but its effectiveness as a promotional tool is dropping almost to the point where it's not worth even using despite those large user numbers. A new study by Forrester Research called Social Strategies That Work shows that a post may only reach as few as 2% of followers, making many artists look at the entire process and say,"Why bother?"

Up until about 3 years ago (before Facebook went public), if you had 100 fans or followers, a post would reach all of them. This dropped to about 15 (or 15%) when Facebook began monetizing its platform by requiring you to promote the post in order to reach all your followers. In other words, a post would only reach about 15 of your 100 followers unless you paid to promote it, in which case all 100 would see it.

This declined even further last year to around 6%, and now Forrester says it's down to 2%, which means that only 2 of your 100 followers will see your post unless you pay to promote it.

Yes, it's possible that these figures can go higher on an occasional post, depending upon a number of conditions set forth by Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm, which measures how relevant a post is and who sees it, but don't count on it.

Forrester suggests that advertisers move to smaller social networks with less competition and better platform terms, but that won't necessarily work if not enough of your followers are there. And by the way, the study also puts Twitter in the same category as Facebook in requiring payment to access all of your followers.

Advertising on Facebook can actually be highly effective, but it also comes with some quirks (like text in graphics can take up no more than 20% of the graphic's area) that make it challenging. That said, if you continue to use Facebook for promotion, you'll have to be prepared to spend some money to do so.

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Why Using Facebook Hashtags Can Cost You Views

Hashtags have become an important part of promotion on a number of social networks, most notably Twitter and Instagram. They're a great way to find more information on a particular topic, which makes them useful for user and marketers alike.

Recently Facebook instituted hashtags into its network with the hopes that they would prove to have just as much as an impact as on other networks. The problem is it appears that on Facebook, using hashtags is actually counterproductive.

EdgeRank Checker recently conducted a study of Facebook hashtags and found that both viral and organic reach decreased when a post used hashtags. Viral reach is the number of people who saw a post when it was published by a friend. Organic reach is the number of people who saw it from a News Feed or on your page. What's more, even engagement decreased for posts with hashtags.

So while hashtags are proved to work on Twitter, they have a negative effect on Facebook. Luckily most people don't post using hashtags yet, but brands do. If you're an artist or are in a band, you're a brand, so remember - no hashtags on your Facebook posts!

10 Tips For Posting On Your Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Post Targeting Example

Let's face it, you have a Facebook fan page for one reason - to connect with your fans. While I don't believe that there's a one-size-fits-all formula for how this is done, there are some suggestions on how to get not only the best fan engagement, but also to improve your "Edgerank."

What is Edgerank? It's a news feed formula that Facebook has created to determine which stories are the most relevant. The more popular the story, the more likely it will show up on people's news feed. What that means is you have to optimize your content in order to make sure that it will have a high relevancy, and as a result be seen by more people. It's sort of like organic SEO, but just for Facebook.

Here are 10 tips optimizing your Facebook content.

1. Don't Automate Your Status Updates. Automated content sometimes doesn't make it into users news feeds, and the same message across all social networks can result in a lower fan engagement (I'm guilty of this myself).

2. Show That Your Human. How? Thank you fans for their replies, and post things that are more personal occasionally.

3. Post More Photos And Videos. Photos and videos perform well on Facebook and are favorites of the news feed algorithm, but they also grab people's attention a lot more than text.

4. Put Your Fans In Charge Occasionally. Ask your fans questions. Let them decide which song will be the next single, or which video they like best, or the album cover artwork. They like to be involved and the news feed algorithm likes it as well.

5. Target Your Status Updates. If you have fans all over the world, most don't need to know about a local or regional gig or release. Target the appropriate posts as tightly as you can to the area necessary to get the word out (check out the post targeting example on the left).

6. Ask Questions. Posts that include a call to action get much better engagement than those that don't.

7. Watch You Post Frequency And Timing. Don't overwhelm you fans with too many posts. One or two a day seem to be the best frequency. I've written a lot about timing your posts in the past, and all studies prove that it's important.

8. Have A Consistent Voice. It's important that the voice remains relatively the same in all posts so the fans don't get confused and concentrate on the voice more than the message.

9. Diversify Your Content. A combination of how-to's, artist or band trivia, breaking news, polls, fill-in-the-blanks, photos and videos, or third party content keeps it interesting.

10. Track The Performance Of Your Posts. Watch for trends and feedback/comments from your fans and adjust your posts as needed.

Just to be clear, the tips in this post are from an article by Ekatrina Walter of Intel's Social Media Center for Excellence. I've modified it a bit for the music space, but the points are still hers.

I know that your thinking that this is yet one more thing to consider when posting, but if you're doing it right, it shouldn't take much extra time. Just keep the 10 tips in the forefront of your mind when composing your Facebook post, and the rest should take care of itself.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

A Closer Look At Facebook Friends And Posts

While Facebook can be considered one of the major social networks world-wide, it may not have as much influence with many of its users as you're led to believe.

A recent study by recommend.ly found the following interesting facts after looking at more than 1.7 million Facebook pages:

• more than half of Facebook users (56%) have less than 256 fans.
• 31% have less than 32 fans.
• musician and band pages have the highest average of fans per page at 12,406, while spa pages have the lowest, with only 1300.
• 65% of all posts are status updates that don't contain a link or media.
• 82% of all pages have less than 5 wall updates a month (see the infographic).

What's more, the study found that there are 2 factors that are important when it comes to growing a Facebook audience:

• Content that is relevant, engaging, timely and posted on a regular basis.

• Rich media (like videos) embedded in your content.

Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines what items populate your News Feed. This assignes a value to every post based on affinity (the relationship between the Friend and the user), weight and time. Weight is determined by the type of story, if it contains rich media, and any comments it might have. Time is when any action (like a comment or like) might have been taken.

Photos rank as the most valuable and powerful content that you can post, followed by videos and then link.

EdgeRank personalizes Facebook for each reader, so it's possible that many of your friends may not see every post that you make unless you follow the guidelines to keep things interesting. Just like with blogging, email newsletters, or any promotional online, you really have to keep it interesting to not only keep the audience that you have, but to grow it as well.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.