Social media analytics firm Socialbakers today weighed into the Facebook organic reach debate with some counterintuitive data. Analyst Phillip Ross wrote:
The conversation that seems to be dominating the Facebook marketing community is all about how algorithmic changes to Facebook’s News Feed are hurting organic reach. Our numbers say the opposite; brands have never had a better opportunity to have their best content placed in front of so many people.
Let’s be clear. There’s no denying that organic reach is down on Facebook Pages overall. Facebook has confirmed it and explained why, many times, most recently in a FAQ post by Facebook vice president of ads product marketing Brian Boland.
Long explanation, short: people and businesses are sharing more content than ever, there’s a finite amount of time to consume it and Facebook’s No. 1 focus is to serve users a high-quality, relevant News Feed so they keep coming back.
But Socialbakers says its data shows that successful Facebook Pages are still doing very well. Socialbakers pulled numbers from the 3 million largest Pages and found that engagement on Page posts — likes, comments and shares — has been growing steadily since August 2013 and is up 30% since January.
Of course, Facebook reports that there are 30 million active small business pages, so there are many underperforming pages left out of Socialbakers’ data.
Still the message that it is possible to reach customers via Facebook is important to keep in mind. Socialbakers notes that media outlets are having the most success (the chart bellow shows engagement on the largest 50,000 brand Pages and the largest 10,000 media Pages) and suggests that brands emulate media efforts to create the type of content that does well on Facebook.
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