Tag Archives: viral reach

Viral Reach Skyrockets Due to Facebook’s Major Insights Fix

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[Updated: 03/01/13] // An example of a massive increase new Viral Reach added //

Facebook announced an “Important Update to Page Insights Reporting” last week. Facebook blamed bugs as the cause of Reach and Impressions being under-reported. In the post they suggested the following possible outcomes for Pages:

Overall, we expect most Pages to see:

  • Total reach to  stay the same or increase for most Pages
  • An increase in paid reach if you ran News Feed ads
  • An increase or decrease in organic reach, depending on many factors such as the composition of your fan base, when and how often you post and your spending patterns
  • A change in metrics computed from reach and impressions, such as engagement rate and virality
  • We know that accurate data is fundamental to building and improving your Facebook presence. We are taking this very seriously.  We have already put a number of additional quality and verification measures in place to prevent future bugs and resolve them quickly if they arise.

In the post, they specifically mention monitoring the overall impact “starting on Monday, February 25.” We decided to dive deeper into the numbers to see how Page owners are being affected.

What Did We Study?

We took a look at Monday, February 18th vs Monday, February 25th. We looked at Pages that posted on both days. Our sample size was roughly 1,000 Pages. Facebook specifically mentioned the following metrics to be impacted: Total Reach, Paid Reach, and Organic Reach. We opted to include engagement (Likes, Comments, and Shares) along with Viral Reach into the study. We averaged each day by post for each Page, then looked at the median when comparing Pages.

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Did Facebook Decrease Pages’ Reach?

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[Updated: 10/04/12] // We’ve received a lot of feedback regarding this data. A Facebook Ad Rep had emailed the following:

  • We’re continually optimizing newsfeed to ensure the most relevant experience for our users
  • One of the key factors in our optimization is engagement: the amount of clicks, likes, comments, shares etc. generated by a piece of content
  • While overall engagement should remain relatively consistent as a result of our most recent optimization, your organic reach may be impacted
  • The more engaging your content, the lower the impact this optimization should have on your reach going forward
  • Feed is optimized to show users the posts they are most likely to engage with, where engagement is defined as clicking, liking, commenting, or sharing the post – or in the case of offers, claiming the offer.
  • Posts that are more likely to be engaging tend to appear higher in feed. Some of the strongest factors that influence this are how engaging an individual post has been for other users who have seen it, and how engaged a user has historically been with other posts they’ve seen from that page. Feed also takes negative feedback into account, which is the number of people who have hidden a post or reported it as spam.
  • Finally, if a page has a piece of content that it feels will be very engaging e.g. A good offer, a great photo, an announcement, etc. then using paid media to “boost” that post to fans in newsfeed can be an effective tool to increase engagement with fans.

Matt, from another agency, also dropped a great insight into the issue along with their Facebook Ad Rep’s statement. //

Since Ogilvy reported that Facebook announced a drastic change to the EdgeRank algorithm on September 20th, we’ve heard widespread complaints that Page Admins are experiencing a decrease in Reach. We decided to look into the data ourselves to see if this is, in fact, a widespread issue.

Over time we’ve seen Reach slowly decrease as more Pages, and more users, create content. The more content that is posted to the news feed, the less likely your Page’s content will reach your fans. Facebook has also been rumored to provide 80% organic content, and “20% paid content in the form of sponsored stories” for Pages. So, tweaks in EdgeRank can cause fluctuations in metrics for brands on Facebook.

What Did We Find?
The typical Facebook Page in our data set was experiencing 26% Organic Reach the week before the 20th. The week after the 20th, these same Pages were experiencing 19.5%. These Pages lost approximately 6.5% of their Reach after the 20th.

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