Facebook unveiled their brand new hybrid news feed for all users yesterday (9/21/11). We analyzed how the new hybrid will effect EdgeRank, however now we’ve had some time to analyze the impact on engagement. There’s been widespread rumors that engagement has been down across the board, we decided to put that to test.
We actually found that engagement was actually up across the board.
The details of our preliminary study:
- We compared the launch day data against the previous Wednesday’s data (engagement can vary significantly)
- We used a random sampling of just under 150 anonymous Pages that posted on both 9/14 & 9/21
- The average Page exceeded 100,000 fans
There are a variety of factors that may have resulted in increased engagement. There is a high likelihood that due to the increased publicity on 9/21, Facebook benefited from more users on the site and engaging with content. Random deviations may have also resulted in increased engagement.
We’ll be following up this preliminary study to provide further insight to how the new hybrid news feed is affecting engagement.
This is actually consistent with what I was suspecting from my clients pages, engagement seemed to me to actually increase with the changes for my clients. Still waiting to see if it last, but I thought it was interesting.
Thanks for this insight. You’ve been putting out some great insights on the blog.
I’ve also noticed a definite increase in engagement. My sample size only includes eight pages, but the increase in engagement (with very normal output on my end) has been up to 60% since the change. Very interesting.
We’ve seen increases in engagement, but a lower number of newsfeed impressions on posts (especially on 9/21). This is bizarre as higher engagement should result in higher impressions. Has anyone else seen this?
Most other marketers have reporting similar findings. We’ll be weighing in soon on our analysis of what’s going on.
Engagement has been down for us–we typically post 5-6 links, questions or pix per day, and we’ve seen a crash in likes & discussion. It’s much less lively these days. FB is certainly penalizing third-party services like Hootsuite via EdgeRank, but even “hand posting” there’s been a drop-off in overall interaction.
We also have seen a huge drop on likes / comments over all. We still get a few updates with a high number of likes, but we averaged well over 100 likes and now we see more like 50 to 70 likes per post. This is from our main fan page with over 3,700 fans.
We went from an average Edgerank of 30 prior to Sep 20 to 3 on Sep 21. Since then it’s hovered between 15 and 20. Any suggestions on how to handle the changes?
Continue to use the Recommendation Engine, time will tell the impacts of these new changes. We are certainly monitoring it to help our users take advantage of the new changes.
I guess it remains to be seen.
It appears that their is also a known issue that is causing a huge hit to anybody using a 3rd-party publisher to post. http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/151722701585098?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150288387352026_18683130_10150304657332026#um1cq0_2 From our 3rd Party provider: A Facebook API bug is drastically reducing the impressions for all posts that contain a media attachment (images, links, videos, audio). Text-only posts do not seem to be affected. This bug is impacting all 3rd-party publishing tools.
I’ve done some test with using our 3rd party and posting directly to Facebook and the results are dramatically different. Posting directly to Facebook is resulting in 20 to 30x the amount of impressions we get instead of using the 3rd party program. It also seems that pictures now drive the most engagement and impressions for us as where our videos were king before the switch.
I hope that helps.
Appreciate the information!