Why Your Facebook Fans Are Not Your Fans
What does Facebook Edgerank mean to you and your reach on your fan page?
On March 19th I asked my readers and fans to help me conduct an experiment to help determine if there was a way to reach all the people who LIKE my page. You can read about the experiment here.
Today I am ready to release my results.
I had approximately 14,200 likes to my page when I made the post requesting that people like, comment and share what I had written. I wanted to see if the activity on the post would lead to more organic views. That is, how many of my 14,200 fans would be exposed to the post?
As you can see, the post was liked by 207 times, commented on 142 times and shared 80 times.
All in all, 11,416 people saw the post.
Impressive, yes?
Maybe, until you look at the breakdown of the people who saw the post.
Only 1,963 of my 14,200 fans ever saw the post. I recognize that there are some people who don’t use Facebook regularly and there are probably some dormant accounts. However, to have such a small percentage of my own fans see a post that was the most heavily liked, commented and shared post I have written is not very encouraging.
Ouch.
Even with all the likes, comments and shares, a silly post I made earlier today received more views with my fans than the experimental post referenced above.
With 3 likes, 23 comments and NO shares, this post reached 2,240 of my fans.
Do you think this was an anomaly?
How about this post also made earlier today?
10 likes, 15 comments and NO shares. Yet the post was seen by 2,186 of my fans.
What are we to make of this?
Well, how about some more data to make things more interesting?
The following two posts were made within 24 hours of each other. The content of both posts was very similar with one exception. The second post contained a link to my blog.
Even though the second post was shared 72 times, the number of MY fans who saw the page was barely more than the post that had only 2 shares!
Want some more to chew on?
On March 21st, my entire experimental post disappeared from Facebook. I couldn’t access it at all. Facebook was displaying an error message saying that the post didn’t exist.
What’s a social media expert to do in such a situation? Post about it!
The real irony here is that my gripe about the post disappearing from Facebook reached more of my fans directly than the experimental post with way more likes, comments and shares.
Here’s one last example before I try to make sense of all this.
On the same day, I posted an image and a link to an article I had just posted on my blog.
Only 1,320 of my fans saw this post.
Again, I say “ouch.”
Mari Smith recently posted about Edgerank and reach on her page. Her conclusions were just as startling.
The bottom line is as I feared. Due to Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm, your fans are not really your fans. They may like your page, but the odds of them seeing your posts are not in your favor.
If you are building your Facebook presence in hopes of interacting with those who are interested in you or your brand, you may discover that at best one in five of those fans will see your posts on a regular basis.
It has been thought that Facebook penalizes posts containing links to other sites. I believe this is likely to be the case, though my similar posts referenced above received similar views by my fans even though one post linked to my blog.
While you may wish that more shares would equal more of your fans seeing posts, it doesn’t appear to work that way.
Facebook is interested in keeping all their members on Facebook.com. Posts that link to other sites are allowed, but you won’t reach as many people that way.
I believe it is safe to say that Facebook is in the business of selling you access to your own fans. For a fee, you can promote your posts and reach more people. It’s that simple… and that obvious.
You see, when you visit my blog you may elect to opt-in to my email list. It’s over there on the right sidebar, in case you missed it before. (Go ahead and sign up now if you haven’t already.)
By opting into my list, I now have the opportunity to interact with you and reach you via email whenever I choose. Your opting in allows the communication between myself and you continue unabated, unless you choose to unsubscribe from my list. (Which I hope you don’t do!)
However, when you opt-in to my Facebook fan page, the same rules don’t apply. While it’s true that you still control whether or not you will receive ANY messages from me, there is no guarantee that you WILL see any of my posts.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
You do NOT own your Facebook fans. And it’s unlikely that communication which you intend for them to view will ever each the majority of them.
That’s why it is all the more important that you build your business and your brand in a venue which you have complete control over. The only place that happens online is on your own website.
So now what happens?
I suspect that Facebook will move more and more towards asking fan pages to pay to reach their fans.
The truth is that we all enjoy Facebook. They could probably beat us like red-headed step-children at K-Mart and we would still use Facebook. It’s fun to use and exposure is exposure.
So while I intend to continue using my fan page, my main focus will always be this blog and other websites that I personally own and control. It’s still the best way to reach my followers.
What about you? Does this information change how you will use Facebook? Should big brands be upset that their presence on Facebook isn’t really the presence they thought they had built?
Please leave your thoughts and comments below. I promise you that everyone who views this article will actually SEE this article.
Excellent post.
Although my Facebook numbers are far less than yours, I noticed a similar trend. Silly one-off musings I might make are commented, liked and viewed more often, but when I post a link to my own blog the views and especially interactions are way down.
It seems odd. The only way for them to have found my Facebook fan page was from my site, and they obviously liked it enough to “Like” me on Facebook. Now they don’t want to go back lol
Honestly, it’s pretty amusing to me. Like I said, I don’t have large numbers on FB, and haven’t invested too much time in it since it won’t make or break me, but I can certainly understand the frustration of those who have put in the time and effort to build a presence there, only to be muted by Facebook themselves, it appears.
Promoting your mailing list looks to be the only way to be sure your fans will see what you mean for them to see. Despite all the new social media, good old email is the one that always comes through…
I agree Joel! The best views I get on Facebook are ones with no links… its even hard to get people to see event invitations since they go to a never never seen tab in the middle of the corner of their eye!
I confess I hardly look at my event invites. I just pay the promo fee for those now even though I still invite our friends… I’d hate for someone to say they didn’t get invited!
Ugh… Here’s our Owned site http:/RockLinkedIn.com – a free training resource for our fans neither they nor we have to pay for! (well, except for hosting, producing, etc. on our end…) still, LOTS more beneficial than earned media!
Maybe we need to look at this from a different direction. Maybe it is the Fans – and their behaviour that is causing some of this.
First – the level of interaction shows that silly or short posts get just as much interaction as longer posts or links. What this says to me is there are some people on Facebook that enjoy the shorter posts and are willing to comment. But they are not committed to visiting a link or reading a long post. In my opinion this is the typical Facebook user. So maybe edgerank is simply giving them what they want.
Another thought – this in all essence is simply about math. Facebook realized that it was impossible for everything to be viewed on the wall. Take me for instance – I have over 1000 friends and I bet I have liked close to 1000 pages. If everything that all those people and pages got put in front of me – it would be going so fast I could not read it. So it has to be filtered. And as the number of friends increase, and as people keep clicking ‘Like’ on everything that comes by them – more and more gets filtered out – simple math – it has to.
Joel,
I agree with the “heart” of your study but would like you to consider the following:
I have been a “personal” user on Facebook for quite awhile. I noticed that the more fans I have on my personal Facebook feed the less likely it is that I will see a particular post from any of them. Why? Simple logic tells me that if I am subscribing to just the “important” updates from my friends (how that is calculated who knows) that more posts will fall into my feed simply because I have added more friends and some of them post allot! If I logon just a few times a day I get a whole new screen of News Feed. And scrolling is abominable on Facebook as everyone knows so why bother looking “below the fold”?
That said, I do get paid posts appearing at the top of my feed and as you say, pretty soon we will all be paying.
Here’s the kicker…Facebook could make some REAL MONEY if they just put out an app that lets you set up rankings for all of your friends and fb fan sites you like.
I doubt what Facebook or EdgeRank is doing is outright malicious. My belief is that they are stumbling along (just like the rest of us) in trying to figure out how to rank the 500 different things we all like and finding it impossible.
Thanks,
Van
http://www.tabletraven.com
Facebook definitely has its own agenda. I find I get the most reach from posts with text only, but the most interaction from posts with pictures. So a business has to choose between reach and engagement. Thank you for a good article that will really help people understand what is going on at Facebook. I agree with you, your blog is the most important way to stay in touch with your audience. (Just don’t check mine out! It is like the cobbler’s children not having shoes.)
This is an awesome test and analysis of how well a Facebook fanpage works. Thanks for doing all this work for us.
Good info. The next era is Google Social Media and Social Broadcasting. Have a look at my You Tube Channel on that. The link is in the URL on this note.
John
Very thought-provoking and certainly moves me to think far more of using Google+ and Twitter far more than Facebook.
I think the thing many of us thought was that since Facebook had many more users, this would be a good venue. Now that you’ve proven that Facebook has a hand in what comes across to ‘friends’/’fans’, that certainly should move us all into action.
Thanks for conducting this experiment, and enlightening us on the matter.
Happy Easter/Passover. 🙂
Interesting – I participated in the first post and shared it on my personal Facebook.
I ran a very good FB ad campaign, for $1 a day, I gained 3900 likes in 10 days and whilst I have a bit of traffic coming through, it’s not what I expected and THIS is obviously the reason.
They’re screening our posts to keep the traffic on FB – daft really, as FB is so addictive even amongst adults that people would return to their own page.
What I do notice though, is that it’s the same people who ‘like’ and ‘share’ more often than not.
Very interesting study though – thank you.
Thank you Joel for articulating and documenting this visibility issue. I have been aware of and concerned about the problem.
I want to suggest two approaches to dealing with it.
1. Post updates without links and than add links to comments. At least all those who liked or commented on the thread will be notified of the new comment that contains the link.
2. Once an update has maxed out, pay Facebook to promote it. We have to accept that Facebook is now pay to play for businesses and pay them to promote important posts (with or without links).
Perhaps the cost of promotion with be offset if we spend less time on building Edgerank. And when we pay Facebook to reach our “fans,” at least we know that we’re paying to reach people who “liked” our page.
Joel..thank you so much for taking your time to look into this. Boy what an eye opener! I will certainly pass this information on to all my facebook business friends! And not through Facebook, they may ban me! LOL. But seriously, this is great information!
I saw this test but did not engage on it. Why not? Because I protect my readers from noise and crap. That is one thing you didn’t take into account.
Very true, I feel it many times, people become fan of my works not my fans. If a fan likes my article he will like the page and this does not me he likes me.
Joel
This was an amazing experiment. It appears as if FaceBook is capitalizing on having “Access” to your very own followers and I am not sure how I feel about the ethics of that.
I too agree that a blog with strong content is very important to creating a relationship with your client. I also, believe that content marketing is still a great way to talk to every client.
I am feeling concerned about using facebook as a tool to provide client interaction if only a small amount of clients get to interact with me. I don’t want other clients to possibily feel “exluded” and leave because they are not receiving updates that others are. I certainly don’t want facebook to determine who get to receive my posts and who doesn’t.
Excellent information! I have long suspected what you have said and long been disappointed with FB…posts that I would expect to get amazing response have gotten nothing! I really appreciate your work on this and getting the real story out to everyone! Time to re-focus on my webpage and blog!! PS: I am definitely not paying to reach my fans if FB chooses to move in that direction! Hope many others feel that way too.
Great insight – thx. With FB changing the goal posts every five minutes it’s hard to keep up and is it worth trying to keep up!
Would you say other social media sites work better? Reach further? We’d all be interested to know.
Joel
Congrats on running this experiment. It seems to me that it makes perfect sense that the strategy at Facebook over time would penalize comments with outbound links.
The ‘smart kids’ at Facebook may have been idealists when they happened into the scene…now with all the money on the table, they have surely grown out of blind idealism and are looking carefully at every move they make.
Some evidence for this thought: They made it quite clear over a year ago with the release of Social Graph that their goal and future direction was to KEEP people ON the FB platform (read OFF other platforms) by providing a single interface and facilitating that via enhanced an api….THEIR interface. Their interface means it’s their chips on the table….its only smart for them to protect their chips, and it would be naiive to think they would do otherwise. A link means they are losing that visitor (which now means=$pm) to another interface.
The idea that it makes sense to concentrate core business building efforts on platforms that you control is not new. If the results were reversed, my guess is that your conclusions would have remained the same. To say otherwise would be to expose yourself to a ‘negative black swan’….i.e. to concentrate and build and build inside their system, only to have them turn around later and say ‘those chips are mine now….thanks’.
Craig
Mostly the only posts that get shares on ones with images attached. Just so people know.
I have a small presence on Facebook with a business page mainly because I recognize that there are people who prefer to use Facebook as their main social network. Like you Joel and John Garret, I’ve also noticed that a small number of my followers actually see my posts. It appears to range between 10% – 30% without much rhyme or reason. Thanks for doing the experiment (and I must confess like Robert I saw but didn’t participate) – it just validates my decision to not put much effort into Facebook.
I love how you have chosen to focus on your current fanbase NOT seeing every single post of yours… rather than the viral reach your social media posts are getting completely for free.
Worst case scenario you paid to acquire them as fans once (and I don’t even know if you did FB ads)… and you’re whining about the idea that you paid ONCE and are getting who knows how many hundreds of thousands of additional eyeballs completely for free thanks to the viral reach???
You are focusing on the wrong thing here.
Really a great post. I 100% agree with you Joel, we can’t really talk to all of our fans.
Very interesting. We are all time poor and there is a limit as to what everyone can read and contribute in a social/business context …and still create products and work on our core business, tend the garden, maintain the house, interact with the family and have life experiences (during which I have no wish to read email, Facebook, Tweets, LinkedIn and especially text messages of the latest deal offered by the local car dealer. Maybe I’m unusual – and I work from home.)
I am a writer, traditionally published author and artist. Most of my Facebook friends are other writers and artists, not customers. When I visit Facebook, my main focus is the groups I belong to. I skim a couple of screen’s worth of latest posts for fun and curiosity, maybe like one or two and add a couple of comments. But in the 24 hours since I last visited, most posts will remain unread. Same for Twitter.
There are dozens of fabulous blogs. If I want to comment/help on these or on LinkedIn (I like LinkedIn Groups and other forums), I can add a detailed reply – but being time poor, the main ones I read will always be those to which I subscribe. I’d much rather read blogs/websites – and I do a large amount of site browsing by following links.
If I didn’t subscribe and receive notification that a blog has been updated, the chances are I would read elsewhere.
For my own website, about 40% of traffic comes from image searches.
Great post Joel, and very informative. I don’t use Facebook for marketing and have no plan to, but it does make sense and perhaps is even to be expected from someone like Zuckerberg who stole the idea for Facebook in the first place.
I personally don’t see him as having much integrity. Now that Facebook is a publicly traded company his policies look to be all about profit, and are not altogether honest or above board imo.
Cheers,
John
Social networking is a lot of work but it is fun at times. And one of the troubles is that you get so easily side-tracked and forget to like or even comment but that seems to be nearly everyone’s problem.
Joel, thank you for running this test. I found out early on that if I auto-posted from my blog I got fewer reach than if I went to FB and build the same post by hand with url back to the blog post. I stopped auto-posting as a result. I see now that I’m only reaching 50% of my fans now. I guess I’ll have to spend some money and promote my epic stuff 🙂
Jack you beat me by 6 minutes. 🙂
And the moral to the story is that the number of fans means almost nothing. We don’t really know anything about our fans unless we get them to register with our website and we gather their email and other golden nuggets, (i.e. interests, gender, age). THAT is where the money is. Forget trying to get fans. Concentrate on registration. Then they are YOURS not Facebook’s.
This just confirms my thoughts. It’s so obvious that they are trying to withhold access to our fans in attempt to sell advertising. That is sad and a very slimy way to run a business. Facebook could be helping thousands of small business grow and flourish, but instead they hold out and try (unsuccessfully) to stuff their own pockets. Email list all the way!
Not to mention that there are so many things going on on Facebook, it takes too much of your time to read through all the articles, posts, and so on …
I tried the same experiment on my very small (in # of fans) facebook page, and exactly 15% of my fans saw the post, as I had expected after reading a similar article called “I want my Friends Back!”
That is funny Robert how is the book coming along. Thanks for sharing this information, it seems when you get in the loop you have to pay more, its true. I feel guilty I have not noticed your page, I will look for it now Joel. I have spent hours sharing on Facebook. Adding images then adding links, resizing these images, adding a couple of paragraghs of engaging conversations and people who notice are interesting people requires a bit of a follow up and they are few and far between. Its nice to get comments that start in social media or blog, then happen on Facebook. Same for Klout, Trust Cloud and Peer Index.
Your article is helping me lean towards a writing a newsletter – Thanks!
Thank you for doing this experiment and sharing the results Joel. This was quite interesting to learn about.
Spending most of my time in other areas of IM & design, along with trying to keep up with other Social sites also, I sadly neglect keeping up with the stats. Thank you greatly again for all.
I’m not sure what the surprise here is? For you to see a post from a fanpage, you need to be logged into Facebook at the time it appears in your newsfeed. Otherwise by the time you log in to your account that post has been pushed down due to other more recent posts by your friends, family and other fanpages. So if people are not logged into their account when you post something, the likelihood of them seeing that post diminishes. Obviously the more friends and fanpages a person is connected to, the busier their newsfeed is and the faster your post will drop down and disappear off their newsfeed.
The lesson to take away here is not that Facebook are running some conspiracy against you and your fans. The message to take away here is that you should be sending out a few variations of your important posts at different times on different days so you have the best possible chance of getting the most of your fans to see that post.
It’s no different to a Twitter feed. If you tweet me and I am online when you do it, I will likely see that tweet. But if I don’t login until a few hours after you tweeted me, it’s very likely that tweet has been pushed down my feed by other more recent tweets.