Publishers who have noticed their overall reach on Facebook has
dramatically declined over the past few months can at least have peace
of mind that they're not alone.
According to an analysis by SocialFlow,
publishers on Facebook have experienced a rapid decline in overall
reach during the past few months. The social analytics company examined
3,000 Facebook pages, most of which are publishers who have a collective
annual impression count of around 500 billion reaching 600 million
unique users. And what it found might be a bit depressing to all the
hard working journalists of the world: In May, publishers produced
around 550,000 posts that went through SocialFlow's platform—up from
470,000 in April—but overall reach from January to May was down 42
percent per post.
That's a "pretty notable drop," said SocialFlow CEO Jim Anderson.
"We said, wait a minute, if the reach is staying flat but the posts are
going up, the only possible conclusion there is that my reach per post
is going down," he said in an interview.
According to SocialFlow data, total media reach across all pages had
been steadily increasing from June 2015 through January 2016. And while
post counts have continued to go up—now more than double the 220,000
count in June 2015—reach per post peaked in January at nearly 120,000.
"It's hard to look at that data and say that doesn't hurt publishers,
right?" Anderson said. "It's a 42 percent drop in the reach per post.
It's hard to objectively look and say, 'Wow, that's a good thing if I'm a
publisher and I'm the one publishing the content, because I want reach,
I want traffic, I want eyeballs.'"
It's tough to tell what exactly caused the shift at the beginning of
the year, but Anderson mentioned a few possibilities: Facebook's
algorithm might be adjusting to give more prominence to personal posts—a
way to prevent the reported decrease in engagement on the platform—or
it could be that the algorithm is choosing to only show users a limited
number of posts from any given publisher to prevent newsfeed overload.
According to data last year from the Pew Research Center,
about 47 percent of a survey of 2,000 adults using Facebook said they
get their news from Facebook, while about 40 percent of all U.S. adults
did the same. The study also found that Twitter users had a more diverse
range of topics and were more likely to follow media organizations on
the platform.
While Anderson doesn't think Facebook is necessarily doing anything
maliciously to hurt publishers in favor of others, he said there's no
denying that the results aren't rosy. However, it said Facebook is faced
with the challenge of balance the needs of competing entities in a way
that's good for not just publishers but also brands and users.
"I think these algorithms are a bit of a dark art to many people," he
said. "We think it's important and we are excited to provide some
visibility to what's going on. Because even when you can't control it,
knowing what's happening and understanding how your volatility compares
to the rest of the industry or similar publications lets you run your
business more effectively."
If anything he said the results are a sign that publishers should spend
time examining their content to see what's going well and what's not.
If their reach is higher than before, they're bucking the trend. If not,
media companies struggling for more page views can rest assured that
they're not alone.
"It's sort of like if I got wet on the way to work because it was
raining outside. There was water coming from the sky—that's why you got
wet. And you can argue whether you should have had an umbrella, but it's
that kind of thing. There's just no good way for media companies to
know on a systematic basis what's going on with other media companies."
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