Do you remember at the end of September when we all woke up to those many changes on Facebook? That was an interesting day to say the least.
From the “Hate the New Facebook News Feed” image that ended up plastering my feed, to all of the complaints from Facebook friends, it was clear people were not happy.
According to a new Facebook study by PageLever, people who use Facebook for fun might not be happy with the changes, but it appears brands should be.
The new Facebook set up is allowing brands to reach a larger audience. They studied more than 300 brand pages and found that the new layout increased fan interaction with brands.
Jeff Widman, co-founder of PageLever, said “Facebook is showing you to more people but less often per person. I would say it’s actually much better for brand pages now. As a marketer, I’d totally rather reach more people every single day, than the same people more often.”
Reaching people where they already are. This is a HUGE piece of the puzzle that brands are always trying to figure out and Facebook is where people already are.
It seems the “Ticker”, which a lot of FB users have a love/hate relationship with, has been a key component in brands reaching more people, as well as the “Top Stories” feature. The Ticker gets people to click more since it’s front and center, or front and right more accurately.
Here is some interesting data PageLever discovered:
In terms of other types of fan engagement beyond simple clicks to view items, the number of comments rose 5%, the number of “likes” on brand news items rose 15%, and the number of fan wall posts on brand pages rose a modest 3% since F8.
For those of you who run Facebook pages for brands, have you noticed an increase in fan interaction? Or what about fan interaction for your personal Facebook Pages?
Interesting. I have seen exactly the reverse. The enterprise and brand pages I administer (1,000,000+ fans) have seen engagement tank. Posts that don’t make it to the new ticker see incredibly poor engagement rate, and the impressions are ridiculous (in the news ticker = 200,000+ impressions, while those not in the news ticker are getting around 2,000 impressions… nasty).
Bottom line, in my opinion, is that the free ride is over. It is no longer enough to have engaging content… a social media advertising budget is now a necessity.
Granted this is just my opinion based on my own experiences. But I work with an agency that handles several sites with well over a million Fans each- and the pattern is the same across the board.
I’m so much more of a fan of Twitter and less of a fan of facebook.