I’ve written previously on Reporting on Facebook Reach, particularly at the Page Level. Another opportunity is to dive more deeply into Reach reporting at the Post Level.

This can be useful in many cases and allows us to more fully understand Facebook Post Reach.

Why You Need to Report on Facebook Post Reach

There are a couple of times in particular when reporting on post reach is useful…

1) When you want to consider organic results in your reporting for paid posts.

• Particularly relevant when you have a paid post or campaign that performs extremely well among paid content, as it can often become heavily served by Facebook’s system organically as a result.
• Without including organic results, you might be missing out on a great deal of performance data and insight.

2) When you are trying to identify particularly high performing posts — potentially for promoting them later — and you’d like to use Reach data as an indicator of post performance.

Facebook Post Reach Defined

First, let’s clarify reporting of organic and paid reach metrics.

• If a user sees the post as a paid placement (i.e. it has the “Sponsored” label in News Feed, for example), that user is included in the Paid Reach count.
• If a user sees the post as an organic placement (i.e. it came directly from the page into the News Feed without a “Sponsored” label), that user is included in the Organic Reach count.
• Importantly, if a user sees placements as both of these types, they are counted in each individual metric, but they are only counted once when the cumulative numbers are totaled for overall Reach.

Here’s how Facebook explains it on one of their help pages:

If your post reaches someone through both paid and organic distribution, they’re counted toward each. Keep in mind that the sum of organic and paid reach won’t always equal post reach. For example, if one person sees your post through both organic and paid distribution, they’ll be counted as 1 in organic reach, 1 in paid reach, and 1 in post reach.

This will likely make more sense in a bit once we get through some specific examples.

Accessing the Data: Post-Level Reporting

First, Facebook does have a method for accessing high-level data on Posts. You can review this simply by clicking on the Insights tab from the top of your page. Facebook may require you to log into Business Manager first if you have your page managed there.

You can either scroll down on the Insights panel or click on Posts from the left side. If you click Posts, you’ll see a list of recent posts, with high-level info:

For further detail, back from the main Insights panel, you can click the “Export Data” to the right:

You can then select to export Post Level data from this screen, by clicking the Post data option. You can adjust the date range, as well as adjust the data you choose to export. Facebook offers several options here to change the layout of the data you export.

I normally like to download all of the data in bulk, instead of running into a situation where I wished I had captured something and have to re-export. If you want to make a change to your selection, you can do so from here. You can also save a favorite layout so that you don’t have to rebuild it in the future.

Post-Level Data vs. Ads Manager

One thing to note is that you will often find somewhat different results from this report, compared to what you would see when viewing similar data in Ads Manager. I’ve seen some indication that this could be due to different estimation models between the data sources, but it can also be impacted when you have additional placements for your ads (such as if you use a Facebook post as the ad material to publish on Instagram or in Instant Articles).

Post-Level data should only be showing you results from your post appearing on News Feed and on your Facebook Page (viewed when users visit your page directly).

Now that we have the data exported, we get to the fun part.

First, you should notice the various tabs across the bottom of your exported file. Though there are fewer options than at the Page Level, there is some potentially valuable data in these. We’ll get to some of this in a bit.

Comparing Paid, Organic, and Total Results for Facebook Post Reach

Going back to our earlier definition of Total Reach vs. Organic Reach or Paid Reach, you should see that if you attempt to add together your Organic and Paid Reach values for a specific row, the total is (almost) always more than the value indicates in Total Reach, at least in cases where you had any paid support for your post. It may look something like this:

*Facebook reports columns I, J, and K in the Post-Level export. In this example, I’ve included L as a calculation of adding J and K together. Column M is L minus I, which is explained more below.

We discussed earlier that the Total Reach metric will not double-count an individual that is reached by both Paid and Organic placements. When some users are reached by both Paid and Organic placements, our numbers can be thrown off. Calculating specific, post-level frequency can be a bit tough (some would say technically impossible).

However, we can evaluate how many people were reached by both Paid and Organic posts by using this data. Essentially, it should just be the difference between our manual calculation and the Total Post Reach number Facebook provided.

In our hypothetical example above, for the post on July 14th, we would do the following: Organic Reach PLUS Paid Reach = Manually Calculated Total Reach, or 2027 + 112,841 = 114,868. The difference between this number and the Facebook Reported Total Reach is our overlap, so 114,868 – 114,539 = 329 people who were reached by both organic and paid placements of the post in question.

Would you want to do this manual calculation breakout? I don’t see much of a reason, but you could use this method if needed.

Reporting Impressions is not as problematic, much like Page-Level reporting. Facebook separates Paid Impressions and Organic Impressions accordingly, and these require no de-duplication or manual re-calculation. You should see that simply adding these numbers together will equal the Total Impressions reported metric. This makes for easier reporting.

Breaking Out Facebook Post Reach Results: Fans vs. Non-Fans

Another under-utilized, interesting metric available from Post-Level data gives us the ability to understand what portion of reach was comprised of page fans vs. people who are not fans. Some might think of these as your “not-yet fans.”

If you navigate toward the right in the exported file from earlier, you’ll find a metric called “Lifetime Post Reach by People Who Like Your Page.” This simply means Lifetime Post Fan Reach.

If you subtract this value from the Total Reach, you have a measure of non-fan reach.

You can use this to estimate how much of your content is reaching fans vs non-fans, which could have interesting implications on ad targeting and investment. Normally, you will see that your paid posts reach a much higher percentage of non-fans vs. fans.

You should also find that organic-only posts reach many more fans than non-fans. However, there are exceptions — especially when a post is shared heavily.

Though this makes intuitive sense, some advertisers might be surprised by these findings.

Here’s a sample calculation to illustrate how you can do this:

*Facebook includes columns I and U in the Post-Level export. I’ve included V, W, and X as calculated fields.

Unpublished Posts: Organic Reporting Challenges

You’ve likely heard of “dark posts” or unpublished posts. These are basically just posts that never appear directly on the Facebook page used to publish ads (except for those appearing on the Info and Ads tab as part of Facebook’s transparency work).

The challenge with these posts is that they also do not appear in Post Level exports from your Facebook page. This means that we are unable to utilize the exported data to do the fun analyses of separating out paid vs. organic results, fans vs. non-fans, etc.

Sometimes, in the case of particularly strong posts that create a great deal of engagement, missing out on this organic reporting can be a big deal. You may have posts that deliver a much larger amount of organic results vs. paid, even in cases where the paid results are robust.

If it’s particularly important to ensure you capture organic data, there is a small, somewhat manual workaround to this.

First, we go to Ads Manager or Business Manager. Then we select the drop down from the top left, and select Page Posts, under the Create and Manage option.

Once selected, you can specify the page you’d like to review post data for.

Though it can take some patience to navigate, you can select to see all Ads Posts. You can then individually explore and review post results.

From the main screen of Page Posts, you’ll see metrics for topline Reach, Engagement, and “People Talking About This.”

If it’s a video post, you can select to open the post and then see an indication of results.

If you hover over the Reach bar on the bottom left, you’ll see a breakout of data for Organic vs. Paid performance.

Note: You can get to the same data from within Ads Manager if you select the Preview Arrow and then open the Post from the link…

When your post is NOT a video, unfortunately, there’s not a straightforward way to break out the organic results for unpublished posts (at least not yet that I’m aware of!). However, the Page Posts tool would at least show you the top-level reach results.

You could spot check this against your Ads Manager reach data. If the number shown on the Ads Post in the Page Posts tool is vastly larger than the reach number reflected in Ads Manager, then you know you might have a particularly strong organic performer on your hands. Congrats!

One bright spot: Page-Level reporting DOES include data on unpublished posts, though it is not broken out for each post. You can see a write-up on that topic here.

What Does All This Mean?

1. Total Post Reach is not simply the sum of Organic Reach and Paid Reach.
2. You can separate and analyze performance of posts for Fans vs. Non-fans, which may provide interesting insights.
3. Capturing Organic performance data on Unpublished Page Posts is possible in many cases, though this data can be limited.

Your Turn

Do you use Post-Level Reporting? Do you have any particular challenges with comparing performance data from Ads vs your Organic results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Post Reach: Post-Level Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Reach is one of the metrics you hear about a lot when it comes to Facebook reporting. When we report on Facebook Reach, there are two main classifications to remember – Facebook Page Reach and Facebook Post Reach.

Facebook Page Reach tends to be the least troublesome of the two, so let’s start here first.

Properly understanding reach tends to be a source of confusion for many marketers, particularly when it comes to reporting on Organic Facebook Reach. I often see it arise in conversations with other members of the Power Hitters Club who are working on performance reports.

Jon has written about this metric in the past, particularly after Facebook made changes to the way reach is defined.

A general disclaimer: For organic Facebook Page Reach, I do not recommend over-emphasizing this metric. It can be a vanity metric that is not connected to actual results.

However, you may have a reason for more holistic performance reporting, such as when you have a particularly high performing advertised post or campaign, and you wish to include organic results in broader performance analysis.

How to Get Facebook Page Reach Data

The simplest way to access page-level Facebook metrics is to click the Insights tab at the top of your page. Note: if your page is in Business Manager, you’ll need to log into Business Manager first to view this option.

After you click the Insights tab, you can click Reach on the far left. At the top right, you can adjust the date range. As you’ll no doubt notice, this is very high-level information. The options on the top right of the chart can split the data into Organic or Paid.

If you are a bit more daring with your data and want freedom to manipulate it more (don’t be afraid to jump in!), you can export Page Level insights info directly from the page.

You can export by clicking the Insights tab, then clicking “Export Data” from the top right.

You’ll see options to export Page Level data from this dashboard by clicking the Page data option. You can adjust the time range, and specify the data to be exported.

Facebook offers several options here to change the layout of the data you export. I normally like to download all the data in bulk, instead of running into a situation where I wished I had captured something and have to re-export.

If you want to make a change to your selection, you can do so from here. You can also save a favorite layout so that you don’t have to rebuild it in the future.

Once you have selected the data points you need, click Export, and it should generate a .xls file for downloading.

If you’ve left All Page Data in the export, the first thing you’ll notice is just how much information is captured. There are many tabs offering deeper, fragmented detail. For now, we’ll just focus on the Reach Metrics.

Getting Facebook Page Reach Information out of Page-Level Data

At the time of this writing, on the main tab, you should see the following columns related to Reach: Daily Total Reach, Weekly Total Reach, 28 Days Total Reach.

These are also broken out into Organic and Paid for each time range, as well as something Facebook refers to as “Viral Reach” – which essentially means that a Facebook user saw the post along with some form of social context. That is, they saw the post along with a message saying their friend has interacted with it.

A helpful tip in case you get confused: There is a definition under the header of every column of the export to tell you what it means.

Now comes the fun part!!! (Also where most people tend to make a few mistakes.)

The golden rule on this: you cannot add together lines to get a total number of reach. Said another way – you cannot simply add together reach numbers, line by line, for a total.

This is because each data row is a measure of unique people for that date, and you may have people reached on multiple days who could be counted twice if you simply sum the rows.

For example – let’s say you wanted to know the total number of people who were reached by your page from July 1 – July 5. It seems logical that you could simply add together the numbers from the rows associated with those days. However, Reach is a measure of Unique Users, which is a very important distinction. When you add these numbers together, they are not de-duplicated… so your sum would be incorrect.

We can illustrate this with a hypothetical example…

Let’s say we had the following results, for three different days in July:

• 100 People on July 1
• 200 People on July 2
• 100 People on July 3

If you simply added these together, you would assume you have reached a total of 400 FB users over these three days. However, you (almost) always will have some level of user overlap of reach from day to day. Therefore simply adding these numbers together will give you an inaccurate count.

It’s important to note that de-duplicating is primarily an issue with metrics associated with unique people (such as reach, Daily Page Engaged Users, or any “user” metrics). If you are reporting on a metric that is not unique per user – such as Impressions – you can add across rows without any of these issues associated with duplications in your data.

De-Duplicating Facebook Page Reach Results

While page-level reach reporting is somewhat limited based on how we can de-duplicate user-specific data, there are some ways that Facebook’s system does this for you automatically. An example is the inclusion of the Weekly and 28 Day numbers.

Based on the way these numbers are presented, they should be providing rolling counts of select metrics against the time frame indicated. What this means: for a Weekly Total Reach count, the number indicates the user reach Facebook estimates for your page on a weekly basis, for the dates associated with that specific row.

If you’re more on the nerdy side (or just curious!), you can do your own de-duplication exercise by adding the daily data for a 7-day period and comparing that with the Weekly data reported for the same date.

This will give you an idea of just how badly you can overestimate results if you were to simply add the raw numbers together. This also provides a better understanding of the number of people who heard from your page more than once in a specific period.

Here’s an example with some sample data from a page to illustrate. We’ll walk through the numbers to make sure this is clear.

*In this example, the Page-Level export includes columns H and J. I’ve added I and K as calculated columns.

If we use the weekly reported numbers from June 30th as our specific example, we would have simply added the rolling day count from the 7-days prior period had we been doing this manually. This would give us 4,274 total people reached (15 people on June 24th + 24 people on June 25th… etc). However, Facebook reports that the total Weekly Unique Reach was 3660 people. That’s a difference of 614 people.

What does this tell us? For the 7 day period, we had 614 people who were reached at least two times over the period.

While some bit of caution is advised for taking these numbers too deeply to heart (due to the fact that the reach metric is estimated and therefore sampled), this is one method that allows you to get a general idea of your overlap.

Reporting on Impressions

Given the challenges of correctly assessing and interpreting sampled data and manual de-deduplication, it can be easier to stick with the simpler, non-unique metrics such as Impressions.

We can validate that Impressions can be added together with no issues. We can do this by using a similar approach as the above Facebook Reach de-dupe method. This can be seen using this sample page data below:

*In this example, the Page-Level export includes columns W and AA. I’ve added Z and AB as calculated columns.

The 28-day metric can use a similar approach.

Reporting on Frequency

You can also combine these data points of Reach and Impressions to get a general idea of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly frequency levels. However, remember that frequency is an average of all impressions. Some people might be reached many times per person, and some are only reached once. You can use this method to report the overall average.

Here’s an example of the method in practice. Remember: Impressions divided by Reach equals Frequency.

*Estimated Daily Frequency and Estimated Weekly Frequency are columns that I’ve added to the spreadsheet. The Page-Level export included Daily and Weekly Reach and Impressions numbers.

Bonus (nerdy) tip: If you want to get an idea of the frequency distribution (how many people were reached one time, vs. two times, vs. three times, etc) for the Daily, Weekly, or 28 day metrics, you can find those in the additional tabs along the bottom of the page level export. You should find that the cumulative averages of these distributions are equal to the estimated method we used above.

It will look something like this:

These numbers are telling you the overall frequency distribution that your page delivered on a specific date. On June 3, this page reached 109 people 1 time, 13 people 2 times, 2 people 3 times, etc.

Monitoring Frequency

How many times your page content reaches a similar audience can be a good thing to monitor. I normally recommend paying closer attention to frequency at the ad-level (or post-level), instead of page-level.

Bigger problems can arise here when high frequency occurs and users tire of a single ad. By running many different ads (or posts) for a single page, higher levels of frequency may not be as problematic.

If it seems these frequency numbers are higher than you’d like, you could consider doing different targeting (primarily using your paid activity) to evaluate different target audiences for your content. Another option is lowering your budgets for particular ads that have higher frequency.

People often ask about the ideal frequency to mitigate these issues, and there is no simple answer to this. Facebook has published an interesting framework on thinking about frequency, which may be useful for considering your own results.

What Does this All Mean?

1. Reporting on your Facebook Page Reach has some challenges. We should fully understand what’s behind the numbers before simply adding a bunch of rows together in a spreadsheet.
2. Impressions are a safe metric you can add together with reckless abandon (mostly).
3. You can estimate Average Page Frequency. You can also investigate details on frequency distribution in Page-Level exported data.

I’ll write more in the future on Facebook Reach Post-Level reporting, which carries its own strengths and weaknesses.

Your Turn

Do you use Page Reporting? Do you have any particular challenges with comparing performance data from Paid Ads vs your Organic results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Page Reach: Page-Level Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook has announced several metrics that will give marketers better insights into user engagement with their ads and page. These metrics will roll out over the coming weeks, though no specific timetable was provided.

Here’s what you need to know…

Landing Page Views

This may be the most useful addition of the new metrics. It’s one more step to further clarify click engagement.

Click engagement often confuses advertisers. When promoting a link to an external website, advertisers regularly misunderstood a click to mean any click to their website. But a “click” included any click on the ad.

During the past year, Facebook provided further clarity by separating clicks into the following categories:

• Clicks (All): All clicks on an ad, including those not on a link
• Link Clicks: All clicks on links, including those to Facebook endpoints
• Outbound Clicks: All clicks on links that drive people away from Facebook

This was helpful, but advertisers continued to see discrepancies between Outbound Clicks and the number of people reported to visit their website from other services (like Google Analytics, for example). While there are many reasons why these numbers weren’t matching up (and they’ll never match up), there was one more metric that was needed.

A user can click on an outbound link but never make it to the destination. Or more accurately, they can abandon that visit before Facebook or Google Analytics can record their visit (the pixel load doesn’t complete).

To account for this, Facebook is rolling out Landing Page Views. This way, advertisers will see not only how many people clicked their outbound link, but how many actually made it to the landing page.

The addition of Landing Page Views not only gives advertisers a better understanding of number of people who completed a visit, but it will allow them to spot potential issues in load time and mobile optimization. A large discrepancy between Outbound Clicks and Landing Page Views would suggest a problem that requires investigation.

Facebook says that advertisers will also be allowed to optimize for Landing Page Views. Currently, when using the Traffic objective, advertisers can optimize for link clicks, impressions or Daily Unique Reach.

The addition of Landing Page Views as an optimization option will allow advertisers to optimize to show it to people not only most likely to click but actually reach the landing page.

Pre-Impression Activity Breakdown

This new metric will allow advertisers to see how many of those who interacted with an ad were those who new visitors or those who previously engaged with their app or website. This is done by determining whether the pixel fired or app events occurred previously for that user.

Facebook says that this will be most useful for Dynamic Ads when advertisers expand into broad audience targeting, moving beyond their own customers.

Page Interactions

Facebook is also rolling out three new metrics related to page engagement. These can be found in the Overview of Page Insights.

Follows: Page admins can already see the total number of follows (the number of people who choose to see updates from their page in the news feed) their page has. This new metric now shows the rise and fall of this total over time.

Previews: Some people may interact with your page without visiting your page at all by simply hovering over your page name from desktop. This metric will help you understand how many people are doing this.

Recommendations: If your business receives Recommendations, this metric will chart how often this is occurring.

Your Turn

Do you have these metrics updates yet? What do you think of them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Metrics: New Ways to Measure Ad and Page Engagement appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Most marketers are clueless when it comes to understanding the true value of their fans. They may have an idea of the engagement with (and of course reach of) their Facebook posts, but that’s just scratching the surface.

What if you could find out how many of your fans visited your website during the past day, 30 days or 180 days? Or opted in for an ebook? Or purchased a product?

You can do this, and it isn’t even connected to running Facebook ads.

How valuable are your Facebook fans? Here’s how to find out how many have visited your website or converted…

[Tweet “How valuable are your FB fans? Here’s how to find how many have visited your website or converted…”]

The Incomplete Data Most Marketers See

Facebook gives marketers a ton of data, but much of what we see in Insights doesn’t give us the answers to the simple question about the value of our fans.

If you want to learn about number of fans who visit your website, most marketers would look at individual posts to see how many website clicks were generated (both within web Insights and the exports). But even then, such data would include more than fans.

Even if the post above were organic only, that doesn’t mean that all who saw and interacted with this post were fans. To the contrary, there would be many non-fans who would see and interact once fans saw and interacted with the post.

Post level data also doesn’t provide any information about conversions. You could target fans with ads, but that will then only help you understand how many sales you can generate via advertising. It doesn’t help you understand how many of your fans convert regardless of ads.

And while you could use URL tags, this method is also imperfect. Combined with Google Analytics, you could see how many people converted who clicked on a custom link that you share on Facebook. However, that link can be shared to non-fans, cluttering your results.

Additionally, using URL tags only tells you how those who clicked on a link from your page interacted with you. We want to know how engaged our fans are with our website and products, regardless of how they get there.

So in the end, most marketers simply don’t know how valuable their fans are. But the truth is that with a little creativity, these things can be uncovered.

How to Learn More About Your Fans

Follow this process to learn more about the value of your fans…

1) Create Website Custom Audiences

Hopefully you’ve already created them. If you create them now, your results may be incomplete. Regardless, it’s good to have these going forward, so let’s start doing things the right way!

Make sure you’ve created the following WCAs:

• All Website Visitors – 1 Day
• All Website Visitors – 30 Days
• All Website Visitors – 60 Days
• All Website Visitors – 90 Days
• All Website Visitors – 120 Days
• All Website Visitors – 150 Days
• All Website Visitors – 180 Days
• Success Page Following Each Opt-in – 180 Days
• Success Page Following Each Sale – 180 Days

The one limitation of WCAs is that the longest possible duration is 180 days. So you’ll only be able to see how many people converted within up to the past 180 days. Anyone who converted beyond that time period will not appear in results.

Which is why we also do this…

2) Create Email Custom Audiences

Make sure you create an email Custom Audience for all opt-ins, registrations and product sales. This includes email list sign-ups, ebooks, webinars, product sales, etc. Make sure that they are up-to-date since email Custom Audiences do not update dynamically without a third party tool.

The reason we do this in addition to WCAs is that both have their weaknesses and are incomplete. As noted above, WCAs are capped at 180 days so you won’t see conversions prior to 180 days ago. Email Custom Audiences help fill in that gap.

The big issue with email Custom Audiences, though, is that the email used to convert must match up to an email address attached to a Facebook profile. That happens about 50% of the time on average.

The result is that you should have just about all conversions covered during the past 180 days, but about half of them prior to that period.

3) Find the Overlap With Fans in Power Editor

This is the fun part!

Create an ad set within Power Editor. We’re not actually going to run this ad set, it’s just for research purposes. So I call mine “test.”

Next, edit your audience. Within “Connections” at the bottom, focus only on those connected to your Facebook page. Remove all country filtering (by default, Facebook will attempt to filter by your home country). Change the age minimum to 13.

Your Power Editor may look different than mine, but everyone will be able to do this.

Next, enter the audience(s) associated with the information you want to learn about your fans. To learn about how many fans visited your website during the past 180 days, simply enter the WCA for that audience.

So in this example, you’ll see that of my 92,000 or so fans, approximately 28,000 of them (Facebook doesn’t provide the exact number) have visited my website during the past 180 days.

When learning about the number of fans who have converted, just make sure to enter the success page WCA and email Custom Audience for the associated opt-in or product.

Note that you can run a similar exercise in Audience Insights. However, I’ve found that not all of my WCAs show up there, and Audience Insights also has an age minimum of 18. The age minimum shouldn’t make a significant impact, but I want results that are as accurate as possible.

The Number of Fans Who Visited My Website

I can now tell you how many of my fans have visited my website during several different time periods (total percentage of current fan count in parentheses)…

• 1 Day: 520 (.6%)
• 30 Days: 11,000 (12%)
• 60 Days: 16,000 (17.5%)
• 90 Days: 20,000 (22%)
• 120 Days: 23,000 (25%)
• 150 Days: 25,000 (27%)
• 180 Days: 28,000 (31%)

The 1 Day results will be skewed by the day I check this. Since I’m writing on a Sunday (typically my worst or second worst day of the week by far) and it’s not a day I publish a blog post, I don’t expect this number to be high.

The Number of Fans Who Have Converted

I need to focus here on opt-ins and products that I have only sold during the past 180 days for optimal results. Here are the numbers of fans who have converted for each recent product or opt-in…

• 12 Tips Ebook: 6,000
• 9 Ways Ebook: 3,800
• Power Hitters Club Member (Past 180 Days): 250
• Outside-The-Box Workshop: 150

Evaluation

I find this extremely valuable information. Do you?

We often hear about uncertainties regarding the quality of fans. Well, I know that 31% of my fans have visited my website during the past 180 days. Considering my page has been around for more than 3 1/2 years now, I consider that to be quite good.

This also gives me a measure for how many of my fans are currently relevant. If you haven’t been to my website during the past 180 days, it would be quite unlikely that you’ll return anytime soon. So I can say that just under one-third of my fans are people who I’d consider “high quality” — people who want to see my content and are likely to visit, opt-in or buy.

I consider it somewhat surprising that fewer than 50% of my ebook opt-ins are from fans, but a larger percentage of my PHC members are fans. Well, that could make sense given the PHC member is much more likely to be highly engaged.

Overall, though, this gives me much more confidence that my fan base is built with quality people who care about my content.

Your Turn

Perform this same exercise for your own Facebook page and website. What results do you see?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How Many Facebook Fans Visit Your Website or Convert? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you were to peruse the most popular blog posts these days related to Facebook marketing, you will repeatedly see a common theme. Post upon post is either about how Facebook organic reach is dead or how you can beat the algorithm and improve your organic reach.

This post isn’t about that. Instead, it’s about how the obsession with organic reach is helping to kill it.

[Tweet “Increased post frequency can both help and kill Facebook organic reach. Here’s how…”]

Brands Are Posting More Frequently

Research from Adobe Digital Index suggests that brands are posting 31% more frequently in the first quarter of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.

ADI analyzed nearly 500 billion post impressions, coming to the conclusion that brands were posting more frequently to combat dropping organic reach (though it’s not clear how this conclusion is drawn).

While posting frequency was up 31%, organic impressions were down 35% year-over-year.

How Post Frequency Helps Organic Reach

If you want to reach more people, posting more frequently is generally not a bad idea. In fact, I recommended just that in a post I wrote about a year and a half ago.

The concept is simple. If you post once per week, there is a small percentage of your audience that even has a chance to see your post. Algorithm or not, the pool of people who could make up your potential audience will start only with those people who were online during that window of time.

Considering a little more than half of all active users are on Facebook every day and those who are may have checked in either before your post or several hours after, it’s quite reasonable to assume that your potential organic audience of a post would be well below 50%.

The complaint among brands, of course, is that organic reach for many is way, way below 50%. In some cases, around 5%.

Clearly, if you only post once per week and reach 5% of your fans, there’s a very simple way to reach more people. Just post more often.

Instead of posting once per week, consider posting once per day. Post at different times each day. Even if your organic reach isn’t higher for each post, you’ll be reaching a potentially different audience each time, thereby increasing the total number of people reached during a week.

How Post Frequency Hurts Organic Reach

Now, there’s a bit of a rub with this approach…

Regardless of whether Facebook uses an algorithm, an increased post frequency strategy can have an adverse effect on the news feed — and ultimately the ability to reach people.

Frequency and the News Feed Algorithm

First, let’s look at it from the perspective of reality: Facebook uses an algorithm to show content to users they are most likely to want to engage with.

In this case, Facebook creates a structure to filter out the noise. While details haven’t been provided in some time, we’ve been told in the past that the typical user could see as many as 1,500 stories in a given day but Facebook shows them only 300.

Keep in mind that these numbers came from an old report. It’s very likely that the typical user now has the potential to see well more than 1,500 stories in a given day, but Facebook — as far as we know — is still aiming to show the 300 stories that user is most likely to engage with.

There are more users on Facebook now. There are more brands. And brands are posting more frequently. All of this creates more noise, thereby creating more content that will simply be filtered out and never reach the news feed of a specific user.

As a result of all of this additional noise — of which increased brand posting frequency contributes — the likelihood of reaching a given user with a post continues to plummet. In other words, increased brand post frequency is aiding in the drop of organic reach.

Frequency and No Algorithm

Before you get crazy and blame Facebook’s algorithm, let’s think about the alternative. If all of these factors remained true — increased users, increased brands and increased brand post frequency — what would the news feed look like without a filtering algorithm?

As the amount of content grows, the speed of the feed escalates. While you may be more likely to see what Facebook serves you now (at least briefly), that relevant content is much more likely to speed past you in an unfiltered feed. Just think of Twitter and what your likelihood is of seeing a two hour old post there.

Even had the news feed been unfiltered (which it never will be), this increased frequency would lead to a decrease in organic reach.

Stop Obsessing Over Reach Per Post

Organic reach per post is going to continue to drop naturally for several reasons:

• Number of users increasing
• Number of brands increasing
• Post frequency increasing
• Number of posts increasing
• Number of “old” relationships increasing

Regarding the last bullet, keep in mind that Facebook has been around for over 10 years now. Your Facebook page is undoubtedly not new anymore. You have fans who have liked your page for years. And as a result, that leads to stale likes — people who technically like your page, but either aren’t as active now as they used to be or simply don’t care that much about you anymore.

So we know that reach is dropping. It will continue to drop. And while you can certainly blame Facebook’s algorithm for that if you want, it’s only one of the many contributing factors.

If you obsess over reach on a per post basis, you are likely to not only be disappointed but to miss the bigger picture.

If you are going to monitor reach (I personally see it as a secondary or tertiary metric), worry more about how many people you reached during a given week or month. How does that number compare with your total number of fans?

My average Facebook post in 2015 is reaching 20,545 people organically.

[Of course, this is underreported since I target fans when I promote these posts so Facebook no longer counts reaching those users organically. However, this is a discussion for another day.]

Within the page level export of Insights, there are a couple of helpful columns within the main Key Metrics tab:

• Weekly Organic Reach (Column L)
• 28 Days Organic Reach (Column M)

On average, I am reaching 40,743 people organically per week and 102,632 people organically per 28 days.

Keep in mind, of course, that I don’t post nearly as frequently as I once did. On average I’m posting about 2.7 times per week right now, which limits the difference between post reach, weekly and 28 days. However, I’m still reaching more than 40,000 unique people per week organically, and I’d consider that pretty good considering my low frequency.

[SIDE NOTE: Why am I posting less frequently? The main reason is that I have less content. I used to publish five or six new blog posts every week. Now it’s only one per week. Your frequency should be consistent with the amount of quality content you have to share, otherwise you will start spreading yourself too thin.]

I understand that post reach is impossible to ignore. Facebook throws it in our face. But don’t freak out about it — and certainly don’t measure success and failure due to it. Instead, keep a close eye on how many people you’re reaching per week or month.

Reach and Facebook Video

One format that is doing extremely well on Facebook right now is video. It gets great reach and engagement, largely due to auto-play.

I decided to test this by breaking all of the rules and publishing a 45-minute talking head video to Facebook — a video version of the Social Media Pubcast.

How did it do? Well, I shared the results in a post I wrote for Power Hitters Club members only. Read that post here.

Your Turn

How frequently are you posting per week? How is that impacting your reach, and what are you seeing on a per week and per month basis?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Increased Post Frequency Is Helping and Killing Facebook Organic Reach appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Social media tracking startup NewsWhip recently caused a stir with a post titled The ‘Faceboocalypse’: Publishers See Drop In Facebook Shares. The chaos that resulted — and hushed correction — highlights how the digital marketing industry remains irrationally obsessed with severely flawed metrics.

This post isn’t meant to pick on NewsWhip. They do good work and offer a helpful product. But the focus of this report has become all too common: Ignoring what is important while obsessing over flawed metrics that are often inaccurate, buggy and impossible to verify.

[Tweet “The Faceboocalypse: Are Facebook shares actually down due to a drop in reach? Well, maybe not…”]

It’s the Faceboocalypse!

NewsWhip’s content discovery platform Spike tracks shares and social engagement to help alert PR professionals and journalists of the stories getting the most attention. Analysis of this data was the source of a reported drop in Facebook shares beginning in mid-February that continued into March.

Here’s a chart showing a clear drop in daily Facebook shares of 10 major publishers…

Looks pretty bad, right?

It was found that after analyzing the 100 most-shared English language stories, there was a clear drop of shares from 16.4 Million in January to 10.2 Million in February.

So… what in the world could be behind this?

NewsWhip went on to — naturally — connect this drop to marketing’s favorite obsession: The Reach metric…

It’s understood that a reduction in the reach of these links – how many people see them in their news feed – is behind the fall-off in engagements.

It’s understood. But not proven or verified.

Whatever was happening, the sky was clearly falling. There was no other explanation.

A staff member at one major UK publisher described the reduce in engagement as a ‘Faceboocalypse’, and said that his team had noticed what he described as ‘a change to news feed algorithm which drastically reduced the reach of many news sites’ posts.’

Ah hah! Facebook screwed with the algorithm again! I knew it. Those bastards…

Shares appeared to be down. We can then assume this is due to a drop in reach (though not verified). Let’s not stop assuming about what all of this means…

It seems as though Facebook is less concerned with sending major traffic to external sites than it is with ensuring that its users can consume high quality content without having to leave the network’s familiar surrounds.

Except…

There was a pretty clear hole in the findings. NewsWhip noted that “likes and comments on the stories don’t seem to have been affected as much.” In fact, engagements remained up significantly year-over-year:

However, it’s important to note that engagements for top publishers remain very high, compared to 12 months ago. Indeed, many publishers in the top 25 have increased their engagements from 12 months ago significantly. NBC went from 9.2 million total Facebook interactions in February 2014 to over 19.8 million in February 2015. Likewise, the Daily Mail almost doubled their engagements, from 7.6 million to 14.5 million. The vast majority of sites are experiencing much higher levels of engagement than they did 12 months ago, reinforcing the fact that this is less wipe-out, more restructuring.

That’s weird, right?

It’s appreciated that NewsWhip provided those details. But concerning that they were glossed over.

You’d think that if you spotted a significant drop in social shares, you’d do a little more digging. What about other engagements? What about traffic? Is this a reporting bug, which seems to happen once or twice per year?

Things weren’t adding up. But let’s just assume that it’s because reach is dying and Facebook doesn’t want us sending traffic to our websites.

What Wasn’t Reported

There would have been a very simple way to verify this: How much traffic was being sent to these websites?

The assumptions were as follows:

1. Reach is down for pages
2. Facebook wants to keep users on Facebook, devaluing links
3. Shares are down because reach is down

If reach was down — causing a significant drop in shares — it would undoubtedly result in a huge drop in traffic.

So… did that happen? We don’t know. This was never reported.

Of course, the assumption that Facebook wants to keep people on the site at the expense of user experience conflicts with recent findings that reach for links for pages is way up lately — higher than any other post type.

The Correction

The NewsWhip article was updated on April 1. They were contacted by a Facebook representative who told them that a bug was behind the fall-off in reach.

We experienced an issue with Page Insights logging in February that failed to count some viral reach accurately. Importantly, actual delivery of posts was not affected by this issue; this was a reporting issue only. We identified and resolved this issue in early March and Page Insights are now correctly reporting organic reach. We apologize for any unintended impact this may have had to our partners.

Was this also behind the drop in shares? Neither the quote nor NewsWhip clarify on that. But since not all shares are publicly available information and Facebook mentioned a bug in viral reporting, it’s very likely that the drop in reach and shares are connected.

I won’t assume anything, of course. But we do know that there is a common weakness in both reach and shares that can lead to bad reporting.

The Problem with Reach and Shares

There is a major problem with obsessing over reach: It’s a flawed, fuzzy metric that cannot be verified. We trust what Facebook reports.

1. You do not know how many people actually saw your post. Facebook reports this based on impressions. But there is no way to verify it.

Contrast this with the reporting of post likes, comments or website clicks. I can dig into a post to see just how many comments and likes are attached to it. And I can compare Facebook data to website data to track traffic.

2. Facebook can change the way they report reach on a whim. This happened. And it can happen again.

There was a time when a person could be counted as being reached both organically and paid. I share my post and reach a fan. I then reach that person with the same post when it’s promoted. That counted as being reached once organically and once paid.

That is no longer the case. Now I can reach that person organically. As soon as that same person is also reached with the promoted post, they are no longer counted as being reached organically, but paid only. That way, adding Organic Reach + Paid Reach = Total Reach.

Call it what you will, but I consider that inaccurate. You can’t just discount that a person was reached organically so that the numbers add up neatly. Because of that, I firmly believe that organic reach of posts that also receive promotion is underreported.

3. There are often bugs in the reporting of reach. This is not the first time a bug in reach reporting has happened, and it won’t be the last.

Because reach is a fuzzy metric that is impossible to verify, we rely on Facebook accurately reporting it. But that doesn’t always happen. It’s not 100% dependable.

While such fuzziness is not typically associated with shares, the problem exists here as well. What Facebook reports and what you can verify are not the same.

A recent post of mine received 57 shares. When I clicked to view those shares, I get this pop-over…

When I count the shares, I only see 15 entries. Why?

Oh, there’s this little gray message at the bottom…

Facebook will only show me shares I’m supposed to see based on privacy settings. So that will typically be public shares or those from my friends.

As a result, there’s a gaping hole in this report. I can only confirm that 26% of the reported shares actually happened.

What this means is that there is plenty of room for error in the other 74%. Facebook could report that only 20 people shared the post. They could report that 2,000 people shared it.

I couldn’t verify it either way. All I know for sure is that 15 people did. And as a result, it’s dangerous to make any assumptions about surges in that data.

Does Reach Matter?

Let’s assume for a moment that reach actually did drop. If all engagement remained healthy — including website clicks and conversions — what does that drop in reach mean?

It would mean that Facebook was showing your content to people most likely to engage favorably — which is what we as marketers and users would want.

It would mean that your engagement rate would improve and the measurable actions would at least remain the same.

It would mean that Facebook is no longer showing your content to people who would have otherwise ignored you, cluttering their news feed.

If all of these things — which you can verify — remained the same while your reach dropped, the distinct possibility also exists that there is a bug in Facebook’s reporting. Or that Facebook changed the way that they report reach.

In either case, how much does your reach really matter if your traffic and conversions aren’t negatively impacted?

The typical response will be, “But, Jon! I won’t get any traffic if I don’t reach anyone!”

That’s not the argument here. No one is claiming that website traffic — the most important metric for these publishers — is down. Only that social shares and reach — two things that can’t be verified — are down.

Unless you have a report that emphatically shows a drop in website traffic and other metrics that matter, keep it to yourself. It’s misleading and helps no one.

The Metrics That Matter Most

We need to stop obsessing over fluff, vanity metrics that are often flawed and impossible to verify. Too many marketers lose sleep over them while ignoring what actually matters.

So what metrics should you care about? I wrote a post for Power Hitters Club members about that very topic.

Not a PHC member? Go here to learn more about how you can join us!

Your Turn

What are your thoughts on this report? And what results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Faceboocalypse: Report Proves Flaws in Facebook Reach and Shares appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Back in June, Facebook announced that they would soon launch new video advertising capabilities consisting of post-view CTA buttons, building an audience of people who viewed your video for later targeting and expanded video metrics.

These things are now here!

I’ve been testing and am excited about the possibilities. In this post, I’ll take you on a tour of what’s changed and how you can benefit.

[Tweet “Check out these amazing new Facebook video features that are now available to brands…”]

Video Views Objective

When you create a new campaign, you now have the option of selecting the “Video Views” objective. This is available within both Power Editor…

…and the ad create tool…

By making this selection, Facebook will optimize for video views — meaning that they will show your ad to people most likely to view your video.

Note that a “video view” is defined as viewing your video for a minimum of three seconds. This could be with or without sound (auto-play). It does not require the user to click the video to view.

Create a Video Ad

Within the “Creative” step of ad creation in Power Editor, you will be given a selection of posts that you can promote as video ads.

You’ll notice that Facebook will only list eligible posts that utilized Facebook video.

You may want to create an unpublished video post that doesn’t enter News Feeds organically. To do that, click the “+” button.

Click the “Select Video” button to upload a video file from your hard drive. Then enter the post text you want to appear above your video. Finally, click the “Create Post” button.

Of course, you may want to add a CTA button to the end of the video…

Post-View CTA Button

Prior to clicking the “Create Post” button, click the Call-to-Action dropdown (“No Button” is selected by default).

You’ll recall that marketers can add a call-to-action button to link posts that will drive users away from Facebook. This is different. This button will be embedded at the end of the video.

Once a call-to-action is selected, you will need to enter a destination URL (where the user will be sent upon clicking the button) and a display link (what you want that link to read).

Here is an example of how that button will look at the end of the video (“Learn More” is the CTA):

And here is an example of such a video in action:

Video View Audience Building and Targeting

One of the most amazing things advertisers can now do is build an audience of people who have previously viewed a video so that they can be targeted later. This way, you can focus only on those who are most engaged.

When creating your ad, you will have a checkbox available to “Create audiences from people who view this video.”

If you can’t read the info tool-tip, it reads as follows:

This will create two new audiences: one based on people who view at least 3 seconds of your video and one for people who view your video to 95% of its length. You can use these audiences to target new ads (video or other ad formats).

Your audiences will appear in the Audiences tab 24 hours after your campaign ends. Videos must be viewed at least 1,000 times in a 24-hour period for the audience to be saved or updated.

A quick summary:

• Audience of people who viewed at least 3 seconds of video created
• Audience of people who viewed your video to 95% of its length created
• Target these groups when promoting any type of content (not just video)
• Audiences will appear within 24 hours of the campaign ending
• Videos must be viewed at least 1,000 times during 24-hour period to qualify

New Video Metrics in Insights

When you go into your Page Insights, you’re going to find some new data for your Facebook video posts, whether promoted or not. Click the link to that post within the “Posts” section of Insights and you’ll see a view like this:

You’ll see the following in the primary view that you wouldn’t have seen before:

• Video Views: Views of at least three seconds (with or without sound)
• Clicks to Play: Clicks on the video to view with sound
• Link Clicks: Clicks on website links

Link Clicks may have been there before, but that now includes clicks on your CTA button.

When you click the “Video” menu at the top, you’ll get a view that looks like this:

You’ll see the following in the Video view:

• Audience Retention: Views of your video at each moment, as a percentage of all views
• Average Duration of Video Viewed
• Video Views: Total, Organic and Paid; Total Unique, Organic Unique, Paid Unique
• Video Views to 95%: Total, Organic and Paid; Total Unique, Organic Unique, Paid Unique

These metrics will give you a better understanding of how much of your video is being watched.

New Video Metrics in Ad Reports

Hopefully you are using Facebook’s Ad Reports to create custom reports that will help you analyze results and optimize for success. These reports have been updated to account for some new video metrics.

Click “Edit Columns” and you’ll get new metric options within the Actions section:

The new columns options are as follows:

• Clicks to Play Video
• Video Views
• Avg. Duration of Video Viewed
• Avg. % of Video Viewed
• Video Views to 25%
• Video Views to 50%
• Video Views to 75%
• Video Views to 95%

Within “Cost Per Action” you’ll also get two new metrics:

• Cost Per Clicks to Play Video
• Cost Per Video View

Your Turn

Have you started experimenting with Facebook video ads? What do you think, and what results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Video Ad Features: Objective, CTA Button, Audience, Metrics appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

First of all, let me be clear about something: I really don’t care much about Facebook Reach. Our obsession with it is all wrong.

I care about actions. And a high Reach doesn’t necessarily mean high engagement, link clicks, registrations or sales. Just as getting those actions doesn’t necessarily mean high Reach.

Additionally, when it comes to Reach I care more about how many people are being reached in a given day, week or month — the single post isn’t that important.

But since people care so much about the Reach metric, I want to be sure you are at least measuring it properly. So the purpose of this post is to step you through a process to uncover “true” percentage of fans reached with a single post that you’ve likely never tried before.

[Tweet “Here is how to measure the TRUE percentage of fans you reached with a single Facebook post…”]

The Problem With How You’re Measuring Reach Percentage

First of all, the typical marketer incorrectly assumes that Organic Reach or even Total Reach is the equivalent of Fan Reach. Not true.

Total Reach is the total number of people you reached — fans and non-fans, paid and unpaid.

Organic Reach is the total number of people you reached without advertising — fans and non-fans.

So when you take a ratio of Total or Organic Reach over total fans and say that’s the percentage reached? Completely wrong.

But even if you do know how many fans you reached, chances are that your methodology is still a complete mess.

Let’s say you have 50,000 fans and you published a post that reached 5,000 of them. While that does indeed mean you reached 10% of your fans, it misses a very important point.

The problem here is that we’re so hung up on Facebook’s News Feed filtering that the common refrain is that Facebook kept 90% of our fans from seeing that post. That’s incredibly far from the truth.

A few more than half of your fans will be on Facebook every day. And of those on, they’ll only be there during certain times.

So while you may have only reached 10% of your fans with a post, you shouldn’t have been expected to reach a big chunk of them.

The trick will be to find how many you should have been expected to reach.

The Solution

In a perfect world, you’d be able to compare the number of fans reached to the total number of fans who were online and could have seen the post. While there are holes in what I’m going to tell you, it’s far more accurate than current methods.

I am going to show you how to find the following:

1. Total Number of Fans Reached With a Post
2. Total Number of Fans Online When it Was Posted
3. Percentage of Fans Reached Who Could Be Reached

This method won’t consider fans who have hidden all of your content. It won’t consider fans who saw or could have seen your post more than an hour after it was published. It’s not perfect. But it will provide a much clearer picture into your true percentage of fans reached.

1. Download Post and Page Level Exports

Go into your web Insights and click the “Export Data” button.

Then pick a time period that ends no more recently than a week ago and starts about five months prior to that. I’m using 9/14/2013 – 3/14/2014.

You’ll want to use the “New” export, and separately download both the Post and Page Level versions.

2. Find the Total Number of Fans Reached Metric

This sounds simple, but few marketers know how to find this.

It’s not the Total Reach — that includes fans and non-fans, paid and organic. It’s not Organic Reach — that includes both fans and non-fans.

Within the Post Level Export, go to Column T of the Key Metrics tab (the default view).

If you occasionally promote posts like I do, you now have two options:

1. Eliminate all posts that were promoted
2. Subtract fans reached via ads (Column V) from total fans reached

Since I promote a decent number of posts, I’m going to do the second. While this will eliminate all fans who were reached both organically and paid, that’s actually the way Facebook measures Organic Reach now anyway.

I then clean up my document to include the following columns:

• Permalink
• Type
• Posted
• Total Reach
• Organic Reach
• Fan Reach
• Paid Fan Reach
• Organic Fan Reach

It’s up to you how much of this information you want to keep. But I feel it will be helpful when understanding why one post did better than another.

3. Focus On Specific Posts

You’re going to see why momentarily, but let’s focus only on posts that were published within five minutes of the top of the hour. So you could use anything published between 8:55 and 9:05, for example.

The result for me is a sample size of 78 posts. Following is the breakdown by +/- 5 minutes on the hour (my local time):

• 0:00 – 4
• 1:00 – 3
• 7:00 – 3
• 8:00 – 7
• 9:00 – 5
• 10:00 – 5
• 11:00 – 6
• 12:00 – 9
• 13:00 – 4
• 14:00 – 2
• 15:00 – 3
• 16:00 – 3
• 17:00 – 2
• 18:00 – 1
• 19:00 – 5
• 20:00 – 1
• 21:00 – 5
• 22:00 – 6
• 23:00 – 4

4. Find the Total Fans Online During Those Times

The reason we’re focusing on +/- five minutes from the top of the hour is because Facebook provides data on how many of your fans were online during that specific hour on that specific day within the export.

If you posted at 7:30, there’s less confidence that a high percentage of your fans who were on during the “7:00” hour could have seen your post since some would have come on before you published.

So the key is to document all of those who were on Facebook within an hour after you published because the expectation is that if they could have seen it they would have.

Now, you probably know that there is a “When Your Fans Are Online” section of the web Insights. This is nice, but it’s for a “recent 1-week period.” The export provides exactly how many fans were on for the specific day and hour in question.

Within your Page Level Export, go to the final tab called “Daily Liked and Online.”

Here you’ll see how many of your fans were online to see any post from any source during each particular hour on each day.

If you are slick with Excel, you can run some formulas to pull this info and put it into your spreadsheet. Otherwise, you’ll need to add it manually.

5. Find the Percentage of Possible Fans Reached

Now, simply divide the Organic Fan Reach by the Total Fans Online for that particular hour on that day, and you’ll get a more accurate percentage of potential fans reached.

My Results

There are many different directions I can go with this. Let’s break down the highlights…

Highest Percentage of Possible Fans Reached: 78.7%

I created this text update on October 26 at 7:05pm that organically reached 4,978 of a possible 6,326 fans online:

What’s crazy is that it didn’t receive all that much engagement.

I had three other posts that reached at least 70% of my possible online fans. Two were text updates and one was a link. Two were in October and one the day after Christmas.

Lowest Percentage of Possible Fans Reached: 3.5%

This photo shared on November 26 at 11:55am reached a miserable 361 of a possible 10,374 fans online:

Well, the problem with that is we know this isn’t accurate. For the longest time, Facebook has misreported reach of cover photo updates.

Second Lowest Percentage of Possible Fans Reached: 6.0%

Since the cover photo share numbers aren’t accurate, let’s go to the next post. This is a link share on December 23 at 8:05am:

Note that this post did receive advertising, which would have negatively impacted the number of fans reached organically. But it’s also two days before Christmas, which may not have helped.

Average Percentage of Possible Fans Reached: 27.4%

Frankly, my results are across the board, as you can see. But on average, I can expect to reach a little more than a quarter of the fans who are currently online.

Percentage of Possible Fans Reached by Month

Take this for what it’s worth since we’re looking at small sample sizes. But here you go (number of posts in parentheses)…

October (17) – 44.1%
November (11) – 29.6%
December (15) – 23.5%
January (19) – 23.8%
February (8) – 20.8%
March (8) – 26.3%

Percentage of Possible Fans Reached by Post Type

The results here shouldn’t be a surprise based on what we know. But keep in mind that text updates aren’t getting the same advantages as they once did (number of posts in parentheses)…

Link (46) – 23.5%
Text Update (21) – 40.5%
Photo (11) – 31.4%

Percentage of Possible Fans Reached by Paid vs. Non-Paid

The results heavily favor organic reach of fans when not paying (number of posts in parentheses)…

Paid (11) – 19.2%
Non-Paid (67) – 28.9%

It’s easy to distort what this means. Some will say it means you shouldn’t promote posts. Stop…

Remember again that Facebook has changed the meaning of Organic Reach. If you reach a fan both organically and paid, Facebook now only counts the paid event. Therefore, the Organic Reach is underreported, and these two are likely much closer.

Percentage of Possible Fans Reached by Hour

We’re going to have serious sample size issues, but I present this data anyway…

0 (4) – 31.5%
1 (3) – 20.7%
7 (3) – 20.5%
8 (8) – 25.7%
9 (5) – 14.8%
10 (5) – 29.9%
11 (6) – 23.3%
12 (8) – 24.6%
13 (4) – 24.8%
14 (2) – 15.9%
15 (3) – 21.9%
16 (3) – 26.3%
17 (2) – 43.5%
18 (1) – 28.2%
19 (5) – 33.1%
20 (1) – 18.2%
21 (5) – 43.1%
22 (6) – 55.4%
23 (4) – 33.7%

It doesn’t surprise me a whole lot that I reach a high percentage of fans late at night. Less competition.

But also keep in mind that I rarely (never) promote those posts. So they are at an advantage due to the way Facebook reports Organic Reach.

Conclusions

I won’t say I have black and white conclusions. But I enjoy digging into this data.

Since the information used here has imperfections, we can’t say for sure just how many fans were kept from seeing my posts. But this does provide a closer idea of just how many were being reached and the circumstances surrounding that.

While I may be reaching an average of 9.3% of my total fans with a single post, the truth is that I’m reaching closer to about 27% of those I have the chance of reaching.

How much of that is because fans have hidden my content? How much of that is due to Facebook’s News Feed filtering? It’s tough to say, but I at least have a better sense of the answer now than I did prior to this study.

Your Turn

Go ahead and try this yourself. What percentage of your possible fans are you reaching with a single post?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Experiment: What Percentage of Facebook Fans REALLY Saw Your Post? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[AUDIO VERSION: As an experiment, I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

Back in December, many (but not all) brands began seeing a drop in Organic Reach. The immediate reaction was that Facebook was squeezing brands to force them to pay for advertising.

To test this theory, I ran an experiment of my own News Feed covering a 24 hour period. What I found then was that 28.4% of the content I saw in my News Feed came from 38 different brands who didn’t pay a penny to reach me.

More than three months have passed since then. Have things changed? Is the composition of my News Feed any different?

What I found was quite surprising. The composition of my News Feed has indeed changed, but not the way you’d expect.

The Experiment

The methods of my experiment three months ago and today were nearly identical. I did the following…

• Sorted my News Feed by “Most Recent”
• Documented the source of every story in my News Feed covering a 24-hour period
• If a post came from a friend, I marked it as “Friend”
• If a post came (organically) from a brand, I marked it as “Page” and noted the name of the page
• If a post was an ad, I marked it as “Ad”

I decided to dig a little bit deeper this time, however, and I also noted any time a brand was given free advertising by my friends via commenting, liking, sharing and checking in. I marked these posts as “Friends – Page I Don’t Like.”

Results: The First Experiment

First, let’s recap what I found three months ago…

• 373 Total Stories
• 239 Stories from Friends (64.1%)
• 106 Organic Stories from Pages (28.4%)
• 25 Ads (6.7%)
• 3 Stories from Lists (0.8%)

Keep in mind that for some time now, Facebook has shown — on average — about 300 of a possible 1,500 or so stories to the typical user on an average day. I was seeing a bit more than that.

Of the 106 organic page posts I saw, several brands reached me multiple times. In fact, there were three brands that reached me 10 times or more during that 24-hour period.

I concluded that my News Feed did not reflect what was being reported. If brands were getting squeezed — if they were forced to pay to reach me — I’d expect to see fewer organic page posts. But I feel 28.4% is a very healthy percentage.

And if brands could only reach me by paying, I expected to see more ads. But 6.7% seemed to be a reasonable percentage.

Results: The Second Experiment

Three months later, did anything change? You bet it did…

• 484 Total Stories
• 245 Total Stories from Friends (50.6%)
• 227 Organic Stories from Pages (46.9%)
• 10 Ads (2.1%)
• 2 Stories from Groups (0.4%)

Three months ago, I noted that I was seeing 24.3% more stories in my News Feed than the typical user (Facebook said to expect around 300). Now, I’m seeing 61.3% more than the typical user and 29.8% more than I saw three months ago.

But of course, that’s not the big news here. The biggest news is the quantity of organic page posts I am seeing. Nearly half (46.9%) of my News Feed is composed of organic posts from brands. And those 227 posts came from 74 different pages.

Reminder: I saw 106 organic posts from 38 different pages three months ago.

I rarely like pages. I can promise you that the number of pages I like now is virtually unchanged from three months ago. The 374 pages I like represent an accumulation over my seven years on Facebook.

Now, something I didn’t measure three months ago was how my friends were also helping share brand messages. The addition of this data makes the prevalence of organic brand-related content all-the-more startling.

Of the 245 stories I saw from friends, 49 (20%) promoted a brand in some way by checking in (17), sharing a page photo (10), liking a page (8), sharing a page link (6), commenting on a page post (4) or liking a page post (4). Let me reiterate: None of these were ads.

So we could take this a step further. Of the 484 total stories I saw, 276 (57.0%) were organic posts that promoted brands in some way. These are startling numbers.

Oh, and you know how the common refrain right now is that brands can only reach you by paying for ads, right? Well, only 2.1% of my News Feed stories (down from 6.7% three months ago) were ads.

A Few Notes on Weaknesses

First, the obvious: This is an extremely small sample size. I am only one user. What I see does not reflect what you see.

Second, I can’t be sure about how much I’m not seeing. However, I do have evidence that I see a very high percentage of page content. As mentioned earlier, I only like 374 pages in all, and many of these are now inactive. I did a quick check of all movies I like, and the only one that posted during the past 24 hours showed up in my News Feed.

To suggest that 20% of the pages I’ve liked over several years were active during a single 24-hour period is actually quite reasonable.

Third, maybe I like a lot of pages that are favored by Facebook. The brands who showed up most frequently were big brands who posted a lot like Bleacher Report (19), The Onion (19), Mashable (16) and Tech Crunch (12). These brands certainly weren’t being kept from my News Feed, but they are also considered “news” pages that may get some favoritism.

However, that doesn’t explain why I also saw stories from much smaller brands like these (number of likes in parentheses):

• Alyssa Griffeth Real Estate (72)
• golfcolorado9holes.com (89)
• Osgood Team – Rocky Mountain Real Estate Advisors (213)
• BeManaged (250)
• Moody Eyes (303)
• Ad Club Denver (831)
• Rely Local Douglas County (1,112)
• Brew Crew Ball (1,362)
• Christopher S. Penn (1,372)
• Naked Specs (1,416)
• Powers Collectibles LLC (1,614)
• Webonize: Online Marketing for Small Business (1,837)
• Parker Colorado Community Blog (2,365)
• My Kids’ Adventures (2,542)
• Roto Arcade (4,077)
• Mike Gingerich .com (4,271)
• Carla Neggers (6,953)
• Share 4 Kids Foundation (8,551)
• The Nonprofit Facebook Guy (9,762)
• AdEspresso (11,411)
• Grandma Mary (11,692)
• Beth Kanter (14,693)
• Inbound Zombie (17,001)
• Econsultancy (24,498)

That’s 24 pages that I had eyeballed as ones that would have smaller audiences. There could have been more.

Finally, results are fluid. Maybe something crazy happened during the 24-hour period I analyzed. Maybe there was a bug in filtering. Maybe brands posted far more frequently than they do typically, which slanted my results.

Maybe.

What Does It All Mean?

Now, I’m not going to make any grand proclamations about how my own results are proof that something definitely is or isn’t happening. But I have a theory regarding why I see what I see.

I won’t argue whether Organic Reach is down. That’s not debatable for most pages. What could be up for debate is the accuracy of that data since we repeatedly see bugs and inconsistencies with Reach data.

However, I know that many brands have seen a drop in measurable actions as well. While I’m not convinced Reach means much of anything, a drop in actions is certainly convincing that something is going on.

And yet, I’m seeing a TON of organic content from brands. Why?

Facebook can’t harm user experience and be successful. So it’s in their best interests to allow users to see the brand content they want to see. And Facebook knows which content that is through user actions.

So I believe that we’re still seeing just as many brand posts as we’ve always seen. Maybe even more, if you take my latest results seriously. For this to happen while so many brands have seen a drop in Reach, however, Facebook needs to be concentrating my News Feed with content I engage with most.

That doesn’t mean that the system is perfect. Some good brands may be getting harmed in the process. But some brands are seeing no change in — or even improved — Reach since December. And based on my latest experiment, this is not surprising.

That’s a theory. It’s still difficult to explain the doubling of organic brand content I saw in this latest experiment, but we can also go back to the “small sample size” explanation in that case.

Bottom line is that the results are interesting. They don’t reflect the overwhelming sentiment from brands that we’re approaching the Organic Reach Apocalypse.

Lesson: Post Frequently

This is the one lesson that appears clear from my results: If you want to reach more people, post frequently.

Of the 74 big and small brands who reached my News Feed during a 24-hour period, 41 posted multiple times. In fact, 29 posted three times or more.

I’ve said it repeatedly, but I’ll say it again: Stop obsessing over the reach of a single post. Reach more people by posting multiple times per day. Measure your reach over a given day or week rather than on a post-by-post basis.

Understand that even though 74 brands reached me, I wasn’t on Facebook for 24 hours. I only saw those posts because I ran this experiment. I didn’t notice the vast majority of those posts.

That’s not Facebook’s fault. That’s understanding that users aren’t on Facebook 24 hours per day. Post throughout the day to give yourself more chances to reach your audience!

Your Turn

I encourage you to run a similar experiment. What are you seeing? And how do you explain the results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Second Test: Are Brands Organically Reaching the Facebook News Feed? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The typical Facebook marketer regularly confuses Facebook Insights terms. Facebook does little to help you understand what is what.

That’s why this infographic was necessary. It’s a thorough breakdown of every important Insights term — both popular and obscure — that you need to know.

This is just one in a series of infographics that I’ve published lately that will help simplify Facebook marketing for you:

• Facebook Ads Glossary: Reference of All Important Terms [Infographic]
• All Facebook Image Dimensions: Timeline, Posts, Ads [Infographic]

Like this infographic? Share it! Hover over the graphic to share to Pinterest. Or you can snag the embed code at the bottom of this page to share it on your website.

In case you need it, here’s a text version of all the important Facebook Insights terms…

Reach and Impressions

Total Reach: The number of unique users who were served at least one impression of your content via News Feed, Ticker, Timeline or an ad.

Organic Reach: The number of unique users who were served at least one impression of your content via News Feed, Ticker or Timeline without advertising.

Paid Reach: The number of unique users who were served at least one impression of your content via News Feed, Ticker or Timeline with an ad.

Total Impressions: The number of times your content was shown on News Feed, Ticker, Timeline or an ad. One unique user can be shown multiple impressions.

Organic Impressions: The number of times your content was shown on News Feed, Ticker or Timeline without advertising.

Paid Impressions: The number of times your content was shown on News Feed, Ticker or Timeline with an ad.

Logged-in Page Views: The number of times your page was visited by a logged-in user.

Logged-in Tab Views: The number of times a tab was visited by a logged-in user.

Frequency Distribution: A breakdown of the number of unique users served an impression of your content by frequency (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-10, 11-20 or 21+ times).

Engagement

Engaged Users: The number of unique users who clicked anywhere on your content, whether it resulted in a story or not.

Engagement Rate: The percentage of unique users who liked, commented on, shared or clicked on your post after having been served an impression.

Consumers: The number of unique users who initiated clicks on your content that did not result in stories.

Consumptions: The number of clicks on your content that did not result in stories. Types of Consumptions: Link Clicks, Photo Views, Video Plays and Other Clicks.

Post Clicks: The number of clicks on your content, whether it resulted in a story or not.

Talking About This: The number of unique users who generated a story about your content.

Stories: The number of times users interacted with your content in ways that were displayed to friends and followers. Examples: Page like; checkin, page mention, Event RSVP; Offer claim; post like, comment or share.

Negative Feedback: Actions users can take to tell Facebook that they do not want to see your content. Examples: Hide post, hide all posts, report as spam, unlike page.

Positive Feedback: Actions users take that generate stories and spread your message to their friends. Examples: Question answer; Offer claim; post comment, like or share; Event RSVP.

Fan Data

The following terms are found within the Page Level Export…

Count of Fans Online: The number of your fans online per hour, by day, to see any content from any source.

Daily Like Sources: The exact location a user chose to like your page.

Total Likes: The number of likes accumulated by your page through a particular day.

Daily Likes: The number of likes accumulated on a particular day.

Daily Unlikes: The number of fans who unlikes your page on a particular day.

The following terms are found in the “Key Metrics” tab of the Post Level Export…

Fan Impressions: The number of times your content was shown to fans in News Feed, Ticker, Timeline or an ad. One unique fan can be shown multiple impressions.

Fan Paid Impressions: The number of times your content was shown to fans on News Feed, Ticker or Timeline with an ad.

Fan Reach: The number of unique fans who were served at least one impression of your content via News Feed, Ticker, Timeline or an ad.

Fan Paid Reach: The number of unique fans who were served at least one impression of your content via News Feed, Ticker or Timeline with an ad.

Engaged Fans: The number of unique fans who clicked anywhere on your content, whether it resulted in a story or not.

The post Ultimate Guide: Facebook Insights Glossary of Terms [Infographic] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

During the past couple of months, I’ve had several people tell me of a trick they found to increase Facebook Reach using multiple images in a post. I don’t chase Reach, so I found the concept somewhat interesting, but I was skeptical.

The messages I’ve received regarding this have skyrocketed of late, so I figured it was time to pay more attention to it. So with this post I plan to do the following:

• Explain “the trick”
• Provide some success stories
• Share my test and the results
• Some explanations for the results
• My recommendations

Let’s dive in!

[Tweet “Do multi-image Facebook posts lead to far more reach and engagement? Here’s a test…”]

“The Trick”

The rumor goes that if you create a post with multiple images in it, you will reach far more users than if you do a typical image share. Note that this isn’t sharing a photo album, but doing a standard text share while adding images.

Let me show you how that’s done…

In the example above, you can see that this is done within the “Status” area of the publisher. Type your message and then click the camera icon to add multiple images from your desktop.

The result might look a little something like this…

The key is for the images to look presentable when uploaded together. If you post two or three images, all will be presented side-by-side within the News Feed, on your Timeline and within the permalink.

Here’s how it might look when you share three square images in the News Feed…

And here is sharing four…

Success Stories

One of the first people who told me about this was Patrick Cuttica of SocialKaty. Patrick provided a couple of examples:

• Home decor brand page with 5k-10k fans saw 262% increase over average Reach of five prior single image posts
• E-Commerce apparel brand page in 20k-40k fan range saw 280% increase in average organic reach over five prior single page posts

Reach is fine (actually, I really don’t care), but Patrick highlighted a couple of more important points: The decor page saw a 989 % increase in post clicks while the apparel page saw 870%. In each case, this happened even though fewer stories were generated.

Here are a few more success stories people shared with me…

From Michelle Goulevitch:

If you post 2 images instead of 3 its a better look in the news feed. Not only is reach up on these types of posts, but my engagement is up too (yay!).

From Dennis Meador:

Yes I post 3-4 pics at a time and get 2-3 times the reach even with same likes/comments.

From Kati Heffield:

Top post (Tomahawks) 2 picture post- 1 Comment, 17 likes, 1 Share (1,107 Reach)
Middle post (Philpott Fact #5) single image post-8 comments, 1 share, 5 Likes (433 Reach)
Bottom post (Philpott Fact #4) single image post- 3 Likes (226 Reach)

Conventional FB logic says that the middle post should get much higher reach because of all the comments. But the Top post and the multiple images definitely shows that your rumor seems to be correct!

From Jose Mathias:

Have seen that actually, with a page of 4,200+ likes. Multiple images reach like 3000 while text 2000 and links around 900-1000.

From Bridget Cleary:

We’ve found the same, by posting multiple images the reach seems to have improved

From Claire Chesneau:

Yes, funnily enough I posted multiple images the other day (taken by someone else) and the reach seemed pleasantly enthusiastic. Just thought it was a one off……

My Test and Results

Okay, very convincing. But I’m always skeptical of any “tricks” to get more Reach. Word of such things spread quickly, but people often focus on the results that they want to find. And any “trick” that focuses on Reach isn’t all that interesting to me.

But the talk of an increase in engagement got my attention. So I decided to give it a whirl.

First, I created this post on my Facebook page on a Saturday afternoon…

The post did very well. It received 37 comments, 86 likes and 11 shares as of writing this blog post. The Reach was at least double what I’ve seen for a single image post lately. But most impressively, it accumulated nearly 2,000 consumptions (post clicks).

While you might guess most of these would be photo views, they were not. Only 66 were photo views while 1,861 were “other clicks.”

It’s tough to take much from this. While the post did do very well, it’s difficult to determine how much of that was due to the method of sharing and how much due to the subject matter. It got a ton of engagement, but how much of that was due to an increase in Reach? And how much of the increase in Reach was due to the added engagement?

Also, my example only scratches the surface because I used test images. This was intentional, however, since I was looking to get to the core of whether posting method mattered — I didn’t want the images themselves to influence the results.

But this test got people excited and a flurry of engagement resulted. So I can’t really take much away from this test.

Explanations for the Results

Still, I’m convinced people are seeing results. So the question is, why?

One theory is that Facebook classifies such a post as a text update, thereby giving them the typical Reach of such a post. Well, I’m getting conflicting info on that.

Within web Insights, that does appear to be the case…

The icon you see in the “Type” column is for text updates. Here’s an example of a photo…

But within the post level export, I get another story…

It’s possible that Facebook is still treating it as a text update, however, and that their systems are confused. It’s certainly a theory to consider.

There was also the possibility that Facebook was miscounting as a result of showing multiple images within the same post. For example, Facebook may have been counting the same person as a unique user when they saw the post and when they saw each individual photo.

I decided to test that with this narrowly targeted post…

Only my wife and I saw the post, confirmed also in the post level export. We both clicked into the photos multiple times as well, and that didn’t impact the reporting (also a strange tidbit: Facebook didn’t report our photo views).

There’s also the possibility that this is all very normal and natural. One photo can get a lot of engagement. Photos often get the most clicks. You add another photo (or more), and it just makes sense that such posts would receive more engagement.

The main thing with such posts is that you’re adding up the engagement of each individual photo as well as the post itself. When done appropriately, it makes a whole lot of sense that you could get a ton of engagement. And if you get a ton of engagement, the Reach should follow naturally.

Based on the reports I’ve heard from others, there’s a very real possibility that such posts are receiving more Reach than you’d expect from photo posts. What isn’t entirely clear is whether this is unnatural. Are you somehow “gaming” the system to get Reach and engagement Facebook is not intending?

My gut says no. But more testing is needed.

My Recommendations

Let me be straight with you: I hate topics like this one. I hate when someone finds a new trick to game the system, and then everyone and their moms start doing it, too.

All in the name of Reach.

You should look at this first in terms of utility: Do you think that sharing multiple images in this way will provide value? Is it something you think your fans will respond to?

That’s what I’m most curious about. And as I see how they are displayed, I think it’s entirely possible that this could be a very effective way to share content with my audience.

Quick Tip: In my test, I only used square images that were 1200×1200 pixels. Facebook appeared to crop out the outer 5px or so, but kept each image square.

I plan on experimenting with it. I recommend you do the same. But when you do, make sure you look beyond the metric of Reach. Does it lead to more engagement? More stories? More website traffic? More sales?

When you report back to me, please focus on these things.

How About You?

Have you experimented with this technique? What results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Do Multi-Image Facebook Posts Lead to Increased Reach and Engagement? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you read the pages on this website, you know what to expect. Fact and data based information, (mostly) unaffected by emotion.

Since my primary goal is accuracy, I don’t try to be first when there’s breaking news. And I’ll hold off publishing a post until I have all of the facts.

Luckily I took this path recently because I was on the verge of writing a post that would have reported that Total Reach is over reported. And that would have simply added fuel to the fire for anyone upset about a drop in Reach.

But I took my time. I ran a controlled test. And what I discovered was a pleasant surprise.

Facebook Organic Reach is under reported — specifically when you promote posts.

Sure, that’s not necessarily “good” news. We want Facebook to be accurate. And as we’ll see soon, what appears to be inaccurate data may actually be by design. But it’s always nicer to hear that stats are better than you initially thought.

This post is going to break down the following:

• What I initially found that sparked concern
• The possible explanations
• The controlled test
• The results

[Tweet “Facebook is under reporting your Organic Reach — at least when you advertise.”]

What I Found

You may know that I’ve been putting together the lessons for my Insights training course. I had completed the definitions of all important terms, an overview of web Insights and was giving a tour of the new post level export.

In the definitions section, I covered Organic Reach, Paid Reach and Total Reach. I talked about how Total Reach will never equal Organic Reach + Paid Reach because you’re bound to reach people both organically and with your ad.

When I got to the post level export section, I revisited this. I used my data as an example to show how this was the case.

There was one, big problem: In the example I was going to use, Total Reach equalled Organic Reach + Paid Reach.

I looked at more posts within that export. Same thing. Then I exported five months of data.

That export included 390 posts. Of those 390 posts, 71 had been promoted. Guess what? In every single case, Total Reach equalled Organic Reach + Paid Reach.

Keep in mind that this was using the new export. The old export wouldn’t be relevant because of Viral Reach (which is now folded into Organic Reach).

The same problems I spotted in the new post level export were found in web Insights. Here is an example…

This is a post that I first published organically and then promoted only to fans. So in that case, you know there will be overlap between Organic and Paid Reach. But the sum of the two equals Total Reach.

I was immediately alarmed by this because I know it’s not the way things are supposed to work. In fact, I was able to find this entry in the Facebook help center titled, “Why does the sum of paid reach and organic reach differ from the total reach?”

Total reach counts the number of unique people who saw your posts, regardless of where they saw it. If your post reaches a person organically and through an ad, that person will count as one for organic reach, one for paid reach and one for total reach.

That entry is three months old at time of this blog post.

Exploring the Possible Explanations

This was a bit alarming. I could think of only three potential explanations:

1. Users were only being targeted organically or via an ad, not both
2. Total Reach was being over reported
3. Organic Reach was being under reported

I immediately eliminated the first option since I know for a fact that users can both be reached organically and see an ad.

Let’s explain a bit more what #2 and #3 mean…

Over Reporting Total Reach
Let’s say that you create a post that reaches 1,000 people organically. You then promote it, mainly to fans, and reach 1,000 people with that ad. We’ll say that 300 of the people reached with the ad were also reached organically.

If Facebook is over reporting Total Reach, they would say that your ad reached 2,000 people. In reality, it would have reached 1,700 people, or 300 of those people twice. In this case, Facebook would be over reporting Total Reach by 17.6%.

Under Reporting Organic Reach
We’ll stick with the same example as above. This time, though, once your ad reaches those 300 people who already saw it organically, Facebook changes those people to Paid Reach only. So you now reach 700 people organically, 1,000 people paid and 1,700 total.

In this case, Total Reach would have been correct, but Facebook was under reporting Organic Reach by 30%.

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced: Facebook was over reporting the Total Reach of posts when also promoted.

It just seemed most likely. But I knew I was dealing with a very sensitive situation. People are going absolutely nuts regarding the recent drop in Reach. If I wrote that Facebook was over reporting Total Reach — all while people were upset it was too low — things were going to blow up.

But I also think that Reach is a seriously overvalued metric, and I don’t want to be the center of such a firestorm. That is, unless I could verify my theory to be true.

A controlled test was necessary.

The Controlled Test

I held off on the blog post. I knew that it was something I could test and prove (or at least provide convincing evidence for) one way or the other.

Following is what I did…

First, I created an organic post that was very tightly targeted. The expectation was that only my wife would see it (and I, as the admin, would also be able to see it).

Since post targeting only applies to the News Feed, I immediately hid it from my timeline. You may have seen early tests where I forgot this important step.

I then went to my wife’s computer and checked her Facebook News Feed to see the post.

As you can see in the image above, only two people saw this post. This screen grab was taken four hours after it was published.

It was safe at this point to promote it. So I then went into Power Editor and created a Custom Audience for my wife only. I promoted that post, making sure that she would be the only person seeing the ad.

When this test completes, the following should be true:

• Organic Reach = 2 (My wife and me)
• Paid Reach = 1 (My wife only)
• Total Reach = 2 (My wife and me)

Here are the results I was looking for…

1. Organic Reach (2) + Paid Reach (1) = Total Reach (3). If this happened, Facebook was over reporting Total Reach.

2. Organic Reach (1) + Paid Reach (1) = Total Reach (2). If this happened, Facebook was under reporting Organic Reach.

The Results

Here is a screen grab of that post, 13 hours after it was published and eight hours after it was promoted…

As you can see, after the promotion, Facebook has lowered this post’s Organic Reach from 2 to 1. Total Reach is correct at 2 and Paid Reach is correct at 1.

I went into the new post level export and confirmed the same data. Organic Reach, which had been at 2 within the export prior to promotion, fell to 1.

So, this confirmed that Facebook wasn’t over reporting Total Reach. They were instead under reporting Organic Reach.

Now, however, I needed to figure out why. Or at least the source.

I found a clue within the old post level export.

As you can see, the numbers are precisely as they should be in the old export.

What Happened?

Based on these results and the three month old help center entry, it’s quite clear that Facebook has changed the way they handle Organic Reach.

We already knew that Organic Reach changed. This was as a result of Viral Reach going away, and being folded into Organic Reach.

However, Facebook’s decision not to count Organic Reach for a user once they are reached with an ad is completely new. And this change was applied across web Insights as well as the post level export.

When I asked about this within the Developer forum, the response I received — as difficult as it was for me to understand — was that this was by design.

Why is it by design? I really have no idea.

If it actually is by design, I guess you could say that Organic Reach isn’t under reported at all. It is what it’s supposed to be.

But I counter that with the help center entry. No warning was given to this change. And there’s no good explanation I can think of for why this change makes any logical sense.

So until I hear otherwise, I will continue to refer to Organic Reach as under reported when a post has been promoted.

Now What?

At this point, it’s still not clear if this is a bug or intentional. I did receive one response that indicates it’s intentional, but that’s not an open and shut case. I still think there’s a good chance it’s a bug.

Some will try to connect an under reporting of Organic Reach with Facebook trying to get you to advertise. Stop. That’s not what this is.

If Facebook wanted to intentionally deflate Organic Reach to get you to advertise, they would do so on posts that weren’t promoted. This only impacts posts that have already been promoted.

Rest assured that when you promote posts, your Organic Reach is actually higher than you think it is. Your true Organic Reach will be a mystery since you won’t know how many of those you reached with your ad were also reached organically.

In the end, my guess is that a small percentage of marketers look all that closely at Organic Reach anyway. The focus is likely on Total Reach. And that metric remains accurate.

For me, this is just one more example of why Reach isn’t a metric you need to worry about. Facebook can change the way they report it. They can change it again tomorrow and make you think you reached double the people. It just doesn’t matter.

Focus on the metrics that lead to your business goals. Those could include likes, comments, shares, link clicks, sales and other conversions.

Don’t waste your time with Reach.

Your Turn

What do you think about this revelation? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Controlled Test Results: Facebook Organic Reach is Under Reported appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook marketers are a demanding bunch. That’s fine, unless we’re unreasonable.

In the case of micromanaging the Reach of individual posts, we are being completely and insanely unreasonable.

Part of this is Facebook’s fault. Part of it is due to an old thinking hangover while more advanced strategies have evolved. And some of it is due to pure ignorance.

If you can’t tell, I’m beyond annoyed by the Reach topic. I was annoyed more than a year ago when it was the reason of the day to revolt against Facebook. And I’m well past exhausted these days.

Reach is only one small, peripheral metric that means very little in the grand scheme of things. And the way most of us are using it is completely wrong.

[Tweet “We’re obsessed with Facebook Reach. We’re furious when it’s down. And we have it all wrong…”]

How We Are Using Reach Now

Ask the typical Facebook marketer what metrics they follow, and they’re bound to mention Reach near the top of the list.

Why? It’s displayed on every post. You don’t need to go into Insights to see it. You don’t need to download an export. And you see it in real time.

We can’t ignore it. We’re obsessed with Reach to the point that it paralyzes and manipulates us.

So currently, the discussion around Reach is always about how “I only got X Reach on this post” or “I usually reach X% of my Fans.”

We micromanage the hell out of it. And whenever that number dips, we freak.

How We’re Being Unreasonable

So many reasons. Where to start?

First of all, we need to understand how Facebook works. The typical user could get 1,500 stories in a given day, but Facebook only shows 300. So that would be the 300 stories from the friends and brands that a user interacts with most.

Based on my recent experiment, I saw 106 organic brand stories in a 24-hour period. That’s a lot. And they came from 38 brands. They became preferred because I interact with them in some way.

You’ve gotta be good to break into that 300. You’ve gotta be real good. And since the user base is constantly growing (now at 1.19 Billion) and more active than ever, competition increases on a daily basis. Oh, and did I mention more brands are jumping in on a daily basis as well as advertising more?

Facebook needs the News Feed to be a good user experience. And you can’t doubt that they’re doing something right given how insanely active it is. They’ve tested a filtered Feed vs. a non-filtered feed (countless iterations), and the current version results in the most engagement.

Live with it. That’s the way it works.

But beyond the filtering, you can’t reach everyone. You can’t reach close to everyone. Only about half of your Fans are online every day. And if you post once, you’re only going to reach the small percentage who were on during a two hour window or so.

You’re angry because you aren’t reaching more than 5% of your Fans? Or 10%? Or sometimes more?

Do you know what percentage of followers you reach on Twitter with a single tweet?

But we also wrongly assume that the Page Like means that a user wants to see everything we post. This is complete bull.

I like a few hundred Pages. Mainly because I like a musician or movie or TV show or product. I couldn’t care less if I ever saw a post from them.

And that’s the way the typical user feels. Not the marketing user like you and me. The typical user.

We’re unreasonable because we assume everyone wants to see our stuff. And they want to see every post by every brand they’ve liked. And apparently, they even want to see every post they missed when they weren’t online.

We seem to expect that every post we publish will be gift wrapped and hand delivered to each of our Fans. Handle with care…

Why This is Facebook’s Fault

This is Facebook’s fault because Reach is a metric in the first place. They don’t have to make it so obvious how many users we reach with each post. They don’t have to make that data available at all. But they do.

Not only do they make it a metric, they make it THE metric. You can’t avoid it.

Beyond showing it on each post, it’s everywhere in the web Insights. It’s here…

And here…

And here…

And here…

And here…

And here…

Facebook convinces you it’s important by making it the focus of nearly every chart and graph. And this doesn’t even mention the dozens of times Reach is mentioned in the export files.

It’s a risk on their part. While it can be motivation for advertising, it’s also the source of an awful lot of confusion, outrage and unreasonable expectations.

Twitter doesn’t even make this data available. I don’t know of any social network that does. But since we know our Reach on Facebook, we scrutinize the hell out of it.

If you didn’t know your Reach, you would — I hope — focus on the metrics that actually matter. The metrics that lead to your business goals. The metrics like post shares, link clicks and conversions.

Instead, we’re stuck in this endless loop of Reach fury.

Reach Doesn’t Equal Revenue

Reach means very little because it is rarely a good indicator of success.

If you’re an advanced Facebook marketer (and I know you are!), you measure things like traffic to your website, leads and purchases that came as a result of your efforts on Facebook.

If you follow your metrics closely (and I know you do!), you know that a high Reach doesn’t guarantee these things.

If Facebook shows your posts organically to those who care most about your content, it should result in high efficiency. It cuts out those who otherwise ignore you.

Here’s an example of when Reach matters very little…

On Cyber Monday, I created a Facebook Offer. I spent $200 to reach about 9,000 Fans, resulting in nearly $2,000 in direct revenue. I also spent $30 to reach more than 85,000 non-Fans, resulting in not a single sale.

If I put my head down when you complain to me about Reach, this is why. I’m tired of hearing about it. Show me that you’re beyond Reach. If actions that lead to your business goals are down, that’s something to be concerned about.

Otherwise?

The Shift: How We Should Be Using Reach

Now, I do see some value in Reach. But the way we currently use it is all wrong. And the reason for this is a shift in the typical content publishing strategy.

We focus on Reach on a post-by-post basis because “back in the old days” we were told not to post more than once per day. Sometimes, only a couple of times per week.

So the Reach of that one post mattered. We put all of our eggs into that one basket.

But we don’t do it that way anymore. We know that if we post multiple times in a day — as long as we do it strategically — we can see huge benefits. I often see 15 posts or more per day from some news Pages.

When you post multiple times per day, your post Reach really doesn’t matter anymore. Your goal is to reach as many relevant people as possible in that day — or even week.

I gave this example in a recent post I wrote, but let’s revisit. On November 14, I shared five different times:

• 8:15am (2,385 Organic Reach)
• 12:30pm (2,143)
• 4:50pm (3,006)
• 8:50pm (5,742)
• 11:25pm (2,334)

The individual post Reach wasn’t very good for three of these posts in particular. For one, I reached a number that was only 8.6% of my total Fan base.

But if I look at my Daily Organic Reach (found in the Page Level Export), I actually reached 6,709 people that day. This number was 26.8% of my total Fan base.

That week, I reached 17,468 people organically. This number was 70% of my total Fan base.

You see where I’m heading here? If we stop micro-managing our Reach on a post-by-post basis, we might actually see that we reach far more people than we originally thought. It just might be over a day or week.

If you’re realistic about user activity and how often your Fans actually want to hear from you, doesn’t it make a whole lot more sense to be looking at these numbers in this way?

When you report your results to the CEO, do you think that he/she cares what your Reach was for an individual post? Or is the bigger picture that you reached X number of people in a day or a week more important?

I know how I feel. But I know this takes a major shift in expectations to convince many to join me.

How about you?

Don’t Follow the Mob

The raging mob will tell you it’s time to revolt. I stress caution.

Look at your numbers. Look well beyond Reach. Commit to fully understanding the Facebook ecosystem and what an effective strategy looks like.

I’m passionate about this because I consistently see results. I have clients who consistently see results. And there are countless others who do, too.

The truth is that a successful revolt may be good for Facebook. It’s certainly good for the marketers who stick around. Remember that competition that kept you out of the News Feed? It just got a little less competitive.

So, I’m not appealing to the mob. They will continue to be unreasonable. They are obsessed with stats that don’t matter. They don’t want to put in the hard work, and they want to point the finger when their efforts aren’t working.

But that’s not you. And I want to be sure you trust your instincts on this.

The post Why Our Obsession with Facebook Page Post Reach is All Wrong appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook recently reported in a sales PDF that organic Reach is going to drop due to competition in the News Feed. Many marketers were upset by this, claiming they were once again being forced to pay for ads — led by an inflammatory post by AdAge.

I have plenty to say on that topic. But I want to be as scientific in my response as possible. And it can’t all be said in a single blog post.

As a result, I’m going to start slowly. Today’s goal is to dig deeper than the typical reactionary blogger and marketer when it comes to the quality and composition of the News Feed.

Back in August, Facebook shed light on how they determine what you see in your News Feed via their filtering algorithm (also known as EdgeRank). Facebook’s goal, they said, was to show you more of what you care most about and less of what you don’t.

Of course, brands in particular balk at this. We hate that we don’t reach 100% — or 20, 30, 40 or 50%. So instead of testing this, many brands straight up assume they are being screwed.

Now that reports indicate that organic Reach will drop further due to increased competition in the News Feed, I figured this was a good time to take a closer look at what is shown to me.

As a result, I am putting Facebook’s claim that they show me the content I care most about to the test. In particular regarding content shared by brand Pages.

[Tweet “Does Facebook show you what you want to see from brands in the News Feed? Here’s an experiment…”]

The Experiment

Facebook said that the typical user would receive approximately 1,500 stories per day from friends and Pages if the News Feed were unfiltered. Instead, users are shown only about 300.

[NOTE: Keep in mind this includes a TON of light-weight stories. Friend commented on this post, liked that post. Friend checked in here, played an app there. Trust me, you don’t miss the majority of those 1200 stories!]

So the first thing I did was go to my News Feed and open a spreadsheet. I then went story by story and documented the source of those stories covering the past 24 hours.

If the source of that story was a friend or a public figure I follow, I simply classified that as “Friend.”

If the source of that story was an organic post from a brand Page that I like, I wrote down the specific brand that it came from.

And if the source of that story was an ad — regardless of whether I otherwise Like the Page associated with that ad — I classified it as “Ad.” Note that this would include any Sponsored Stories that mentioned my friends.

A few things I was looking for…

• Are organic posts from Pages being squeezed out?
• Are ads taking over the News Feed?
• Are the posts I’m seeing from brands what I actually want to see?
• Is the number of stories being displayed consistent with Facebook’s claims?

Let’s find out…

The Breakdown of Stories

I actually received quite a few more stories than the 300 Facebook says to expect — 373 in all. Here is how those posts are broken down:

• 239 Stories from Friends (64.1%)
• 106 Organic Stories from Pages (28.4%)
• 25 Ads (6.7%)
• 3 Stories from Lists (0.8%)

I don’t know about you, but this seems like a fair breakdown. Not too many ads. Organic stories from brand Pages aren’t being drowned out. Lots of stories from friends.

The Breakdown of Page Stories

Now, here is where it gets interesting…

Those 106 Page stories came from a grand total of 38 unique brand Pages, for an average of 2.8 per Page. Most marketers seem to assume that only some of our posts are shown. But really, based on what I’m seeing, it appears I see almost everything that I care about most.

When I looked through that list of 38 Pages, these were definitely all brands I care about most (or have interacted with recently). And what’s funny is that I rarely — or almost never — comment on brand posts. But Facebook “somehow” knows what I like.

Take a look at what I saw from the brands represented the most:

• Mashable – 16
• TechCrunch – 15
• The Onion – 10
• Green Bay Packers – 7
• Post Planner – 5
• AllFacebook.com – 4
• NFL – 4

I almost never comment on content shared by these brands (Post Planner being the one exception). But I do read comments. And I do click on links. This was enough to tell Facebook that I would like to see a combined 31 link shares from Mashable and TechCrunch covering a 24 hour period.

Answering the Questions

Okay, so now let’s get back to some of the questions I was hoping to answer…

Q: Are organic posts from Pages being squeezed out?

It sure doesn’t seem that way. More than a quarter of the stories I saw in my News Feed covering a 24-hour period were organically from brands. I certainly don’t want 50% or more of the stories in my News Feeds to be commercial.

Q: Are ads taking over the News Feed?

Not at all. Only 6.7% of the stories I saw were ads.

Q: Are the posts I’m seeing from brands what I actually want to see?

Absolutely. I saw 31 posts total from Mashable and TechCrunch. As I look through the list of brands represented, there is a good reason for all of them to be there.

Q: Is the number of stories being displayed consistent with Facebook’s claims?

Yes. In fact, I saw 24% more stories than Facebook said I should expect.

Closing Thoughts

First of all, it’s quite clear to me that Facebook is showing me the content I want to see, particularly from brands. Or to put it more accurately, what I end up seeing is engaging content — I don’t know what I couldn’t see. Looking at that list, I have no complaints or arguments.

Second, what I see here conflicts with the biggest complaints from brands in a couple of ways…

One claim is that brands can’t enter the News Feed without paying for ads. This is clearly not the case since 28.4% of the stories I documented in this study were organic posts from brands.

Another claim is that Facebook is preventing brands from reaching people who actually want to see their content. Well, that’s certainly not the case for me when it comes to Mashable, TechCrunch and others. I’ve shown Facebook through my actions that I like their content, and as a result I see a ton of it.

This doesn’t mean that brands don’t have an argument. I understand the feeling of being shortchanged when you pay for ads to increase Likes but then can’t reach those users in the News Feed.

But you know what? That falls on us. The 38 brands that reached me during this 24 hour period have provided compelling content that inspires me to interact with them in some way. As a result, I see their content regularly.

Sure, filtering content certainly does fatten Facebook’s pocketbooks by making it more necessary to advertise. But — separating my roles as a user from that of a brand for a moment — I fully believe that it also improves my experience consuming content on Facebook.

The filtering isn’t perfect. Maybe Facebook should expand the number of stories highlighted in News Feed per day to 500. Maybe users should be given an unfiltered option.

But what I’m not seeing here is filtering done for the sole purpose of screwing brands, at the expense of user experience. If you want to reach more Fans organically, you need to compete with the mounds of content that users could see every day. To be “preferred,” you need to do one of two things: 1) Be awesome or 2) Pay to reach them.

Or you could do both and get even greater results!

What do you think? Are you seeing what you want to see in your News Feed? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

The post An Experiment: Testing Facebook’s News Feed Filtering Algorithm appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Forrester recently published a blog post called An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg that carelessly attempted to claim that Facebook advertising and marketing are ineffective, using a survey of 395 marketers and business executives as the proof.

I was initially going to write a post that would pick apart the endless flaws found throughout that study. But after reading the comments attached to the post, I realized I wouldn’t be breaking ground here — most rational people know the report can’t be taken seriously.

But what a post like that does is provide validation for the people who fail at Facebook. They use this as their excuse when things don’t go as planned. This allows them to put the blame on Facebook for their failures rather than accepting responsibility.

Still, that post got me thinking. It raised many questions. I wanted to know whether the 395 marketers and executives had ever used any of the countless tools and strategies common among those who succeed with Facebook.

As a result, I use that awful post as inspiration. I am willing to wager that the vast majority of brands and marketers who don’t find success on Facebook aren’t doing many of the following things…

[Tweet “If you’re failing at Facebook marketing, it’s probably because you aren’t doing these 14 things…”]

1. Provide Value

This should be obvious, but failure on Facebook can often be tracked back to this simple step.

Are you providing value? Are you making the lives of people better when sharing content? Are you educating or entertaining? Would you want to see your content every day in your News Feed?

If all you do is post content that tries to sell your stuff or act as your brand’s PR, you aren’t providing value. You are spamming.

2. Use a Consistent and Frequent Publishing Schedule

Now you need to provide that value on a consistent basis. Once or twice a week isn’t going to cut it. Post multiple times per day, spaced out by at least a few hours.

Implement a content plan and use scheduling software (or Facebook’s built in scheduler) to make sure you have content flowing through on a regular basis.

3. Involve Your Fans

When Fans comment on your post, respond. When they ask you a question, give them a thoughtful reply.

Create posts that involve your audience. Ask them what they think. Ask them to share their story. Ask them to provide their opinion.

Don’t know what types of content your Fans want to see? Ask them!

4. Focus on Relevant Fans, Not Cheapest Price

Far too often, the brands that fail on Facebook slip up here. They care about the “almighty Like” more than the people behind the action.

As a result, they buy Likes. Or they run poorly targeted ads that bring in bots and people who don’t care about their brand. All because they are concerned first with cost and last with relevance.

Craft content that appeals to your target audience. Run ads that are micro-targeted to reach those who matter most.

Forget about ads that generate Likes at 10 cents a piece. You will spend more. But when your focus is on quality, these efforts will pay off.

5. Find Your Target Audience Using Graph Search and Lookalike Audiences

Sure, you have committed to finding your ideal audience and attracting them. But how do you go about it?

You could guess by running ads that target precise interests that you think are associated with your target audience. Or you could be more scientific about it.

Whenever I run ads that target non-Fans, I create separate ads that reach each of the following groups:

• People who like similar Pages and interests
• Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• Lookalike Audience (Similarity)
• People who like similar Pages and interests + Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• People who like similar Pages and interests + Lookalike Audience (Similarity)

First, let me explain how I generate my list of similar Pages and interests.

Come up with two brands that you consider your competitors or would have a very similar audience to your own. Then run a series of Graph Searches.

When I search for Pages liked by people who like Social Media Examiner and Mari Smith, I get the following first page results:

• Mari Smith
• Mashable
• Social Media Today
• Seth Godin
• Guy Kawasaki
• Social Fresh
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Tech Crunch
• Social Media Club
• New Media Expo
• Amy Porterfield
• The Next Web

This is a great start for a Precise Interests list when targeting ads (I’d turn that list into a Saved Target Group).

Next, you’ll want to take your email list and generate a Custom Audience. You could use your full email list or a list only of those who have bought from you.

From that Custom Audience, have Facebook generate Lookalike Audiences optimized for both Reach and Similarity.

When you’re done, you’ll have the building blocks for targeting relevant non-Fans.

6. Focus on the Metrics that Matter

What determines the success or failure of your Page or advertising efforts? Are you focusing on the metrics that matter?

Far too many marketers get bent out of shape obsessing over things like Reach and Page Likes. Neither of these two things, in and of themselves, mean a whole lot. And if they drive your strategy, you are bound to fail.

How much valuable engagement does your content drive? How much traffic to your website?

Do your ads result in conversions and sales? What is your cost per conversion?

These are the types of things you need to be worried about. Don’t distract yourself with metrics like Reach, CPM, CPC and Click Through Rate.

7. Don’t Click the Boost Post Button

While there are over 1 Million advertisers on Facebook, I guarantee that a high percentage of these people are casual advertisers who have only hit the Boost Post button.

It’s easy to do. But with simplicity goes a lack of control, and this way of advertising will likely lead to wasted ad spend.

You are more sophisticated than this. You want to reach a specific audience in specific placements.

8. Use Power Editor

One way to promote a post effectively is with Power Editor. You can, for example, target only Fans and reach them only in the News Feed.

If you’re serious about Facebook advertising, you need to use Power Editor. This is how you get full control over your ads and get full access to all of the tools and features that come with Facebook advertising.

While using the self-serve ad tool is certainly a step up from boosting a post, you can do better.

9. Use Conversion Tracking

Every time you run an ad that leads to some sort of conversion (purchase, registration or lead), you need to use Conversion Tracking.

Every. Single. Time.

If you don’t use Conversion Tracking, you won’t know whether your campaign truly was a success or failure. You’ll guess regarding the number of conversions it brought. And you’ll focus on metrics that could be completely independent of a conversion (CPM, CPC, CTR, etc.).

If your ad leads to a conversion, the only metrics you need to be aware of are Conversions and Cost Per Conversion. You want the lowest Cost Per Conversion as is possible.

But if you don’t use Conversion Tracking, this isn’t an option.

10. Target Your Email List

When you build your Fan base, do you run an ad that targets your email list to attract those who have already done business with you?

When you launch a product, do you run an ad targeted at those who have bought from you before?

You can do this with Custom Audiences. And if you don’t use this feature, you are ignoring a very important segment of your customer base!

11. Sell to Your Fans

While your focus on Facebook shouldn’t be only to sell, your Fans are the people most likely to buy from you.

If you spend more on ads that target non-Fans with product offers than Fans, you are likely throwing money away.

Target non-Fans to bring in new Fans. Gain trust from them by consistently providing value. Then sell.

It’s a simple Facebook sales funnel. And one that can lead to a very high ROI.

12. Optimize Your Images

When you share a link or run a link ad, does the thumbnail image take up the width of the News Feed, whether on desktop or mobile?

Bigger images lead to more engagement. Those thumbnails are begging to be clicked on.

If your link share results in a tiny, square thumbnail image, don’t expect it to get clicked!

13. Create Multiple Campaign and Ad Variations

You can’t report success or failure based on a single ad. There are far too many factors that lead to whether or not an ad works.

Test different copy, images and targeting. Test with different ad types, using Sponsored Stories or page posts. Test using link shares, videos or photos.

Don’t trust small sample sizes. Find what doesn’t work and stop those ads. Find what does work and escalate!

14. Optimize Ads Using Ad Reports

You may have an apparent failing ad that actually has success buried within the results. But you won’t know that without using Facebook’s ad reports.

With this amazing tool, you can figure out the Cost Per Action based on age, gender, country and placement. Placement, in particular, can result in wildly varying costs.

Use these reports to find what does and doesn’t work. Then optimize your ads!

Your Turn

What other tools and strategies are common among those who succeed on Facebook? Let me know in the comments below!

The post 14 Steps to Succeeding at Facebook Marketing appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: Master all of the metrics that matter and sign up for my Insights training course.]

There are dozens of Facebook metrics. Even the most popularly used metrics are largely misunderstood (make sure you check out this glossary of terms!).

This is especially the case for admins whose source of metrics knowledge is within posts or within web Insights only. I encourage you to look beyond these surface level metrics and dig into your exports — this is where marketing gold is found!

Access this data by clicking the “Export Data” button within your web Insights.

[Tweet “That Facebook metric doesn’t mean what you think it means!”]

So here are a few of the metrics you are probably currently butchering, along with their actual meanings and the metrics you are looking for…

Total Reach or Organic Reach

The Reach metric is the most unnecessarily obsessed over while also misunderstood. It’s so misunderstood and confused that admins are confusing multiple metrics while none of them mean what they think they do.

Two of these metrics are Total Reach and Organic Reach. Total Reach can also be expressed as “[X number] people saw this post” under posts on your Page.

What You Think It Means: You think that Total Reach, [X number] People Saw This, and Organic Reach all tell you the number of Fans who saw a post. News Flash: They don’t!

What It Actually Means: Total Reach (or [X number] People Saw This) tells you the total number of people who saw a post. That includes Fans and non-Fans, and it also means reaching people with and without ads. It means reaching people within their News Feeds, on your Page and as shared by friends. The key word here is “TOTAL.”

Organic Reach is the number of unique users (Fans or non-Fans) who saw your Page post in News Feed, Ticker or on your Page. Organically, of course, and not as the result of an ad.

What You Probably Want: If you want to know the number of your Fans you reached with a post, you need to dig into your Post Level Export. The name of this metric is “Lifetime Post Reach by People Who Like Your Page” and it is in column X of the Key Metrics tab.

Of course, if you’ve been whining about your Total Reach being under 16% of your total Fan base, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening. This number will be even lower!

Also note that if you want to dig even more into your Fan-only data, there are seven columns of data there for you to discover!

People Talking About This

Everyone knows about the People Talking About This metric because it’s displayed immediately under your Cover Photo.

What You Think It Means: You think this is the number of people sharing, commenting on and liking your Page content. Oh, it includes those actions. But it’s more than that!

What It Actually Means: This is the number of people generating stories about your Page during the past week. So this includes post comments, likes and shares. But it also includes Page likes, check-ins, event RSVPs, Offer claims, mentioning your Page and writing on your Timeline.

The Page Talking About This metric isn’t necessarily terrible. But it’s easy to manipulate with ads (especially driving a lot of Likes), and it doesn’t focus on post quality, which is likely what you’re looking for.

What You Probably Want: What you probably want is Lifetime Talking About this on a post-level basis, and it can be found within your Post Level Export. The total count can be found in column Q of the Key Metrics tab, but you can get a breakdown (Comments, Likes, Shares) within the Lifetime Talking About This tab.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a Talking About This metric for all posts, but only on a post-by-post basis.

Post Clicks

This is a new metric that is found only within web Insights under Posts.

What You Think It Means: You think it’s link clicks. Nope!

What It Actually Means: This is the total number of clicks on a post, not including comments, likes and shares. So this includes every other type of click you can imagine (photo view, video play, reporting spam, expanding to read a post, expanding to read comments, clicking profiles within comments, etc.).

What You Probably Want: You want Link Clicks! This is a very valuable metric that is buried within the Post Level Export under Consumers and Consumptions. Look under the Lifetime Post Consumers by Type and Lifetime Post Consumptions by Type tabs. In each case, column I is for Link Clicks. That’s your baby!

Consumptions is a great metric to get to know. It’s my favorite metric because it allows me to dig through just how valuable engagement on a post was, separating fluff from substance.

Your Turn

What metrics do you confuse — or do you find other marketers regularly confuse?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 3 Facebook Metrics That Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The new and improved web version of Facebook Insights is being rolled out, and I am one of the lucky ones who has been able to take it for a spin.

So… how is it?

What’s New

This is not a tweak. The new Facebook web Insights is drastically different than before. Some features are new and some are simply displayed in a much more easily to consume format.

Vastly Improved Interface
If you used Facebook Insights before, you will immediately notice a difference. And you should be pleasantly surprised.

The new UI is faster, cleaner and has a color scheme refresh. Most importantly, it does a better job of surfacing value.

Rate Comparisons
An example is below. Of the people I reached during a given period, 4.9% were women aged 18-24. However, only 4.0% of my Fans fit this same demographic.

4.9 / 4.0 = 1.2X the expected rate

Filtering
By default, you can view the performance of posts based on two groups of data: 1) Post Clicks; and 2) Likes, Comments & Shares.

Filtering allows admins to get a more refined look into types of Engagement and Reach.

Click and Drag Date Select
This is a small, but necessary, change. Selecting date ranges before was a clunky hassle. Now you simply click and drag and all date ranges viewed on the screen change dynamically.

Best Post Types
This is an interesting addition. Facebook tells you which of your post types are “best” based on performance. Unfortunately, the only performance metrics used here are Reach, Post Clicks and Likes, Comments & Shares.

I’d love to see this broken down further. You will always get more Post Clicks from photos than other post types due to the Photo View not applying to other types. It’s misleading.

What about link clicks? What about other, specific types of Engagement?

For now, this will do. But expect marketers to make too big a deal of these results.

What’s Awesome

Some of the new items aren’t all that exciting. But this stuff? Pretty freaking cool!

When Your Fans Are Online
Whoa. Facebook now tells you the average number of people who saw your posts during each hour of the day covering a 7-day period.

This is pretty darn cool. I’d like to see this in real time. And I’d like to see when my Fans are engaging most as well.

But it’s a really nice start!

Benchmarks
This is a new feature within Insights that allows you to compare performance over time. For example, compare your average number of post comments between periods.

This feature is available within the Page tab graphs. Click on an individual metric on the right and Facebook will focus on the average trend for that stat.

Post Clicks
A good addition to web Insights. Marketers often confuse the meaning of Engagement. Facebook defines it as including all clicks, not only comments, likes and shares.

But what about those other clicks?

Post Clicks are now a separate stat to give you an idea of other clicks your posts are receiving that may not be so obvious. An example would be a photo click.

What Sucks

Come on, Facebook. You were on the right path. But what about this stuff?

Exports Unaffected (So Far)
Exports are so freaking clunky and hard to use. And they haven’t been touched in this refresh.

Top Level Data Only
One reason the exports are so important is because they hold the mounds of data that the web version misses. That remains the case.

There has to be a balance in here. Ease of use as well as surfacing any important piece of data you want to see. Right now, you only see what Facebook wants you to see.

Okay, so let’s take you through the new Facebook web Insights, view by view…

1. Overview Tab

This tab presents four modules that represent the information Facebook thinks you will care most about. Three modules in a row at the top (Page Likes, Post Reach and Engagement) and one big module at the bottom (most recent post performance).

This covers data from the past seven days.

2. Page Tab

This tab is broken down into three sections.

Page Likes
View the following:

• Page Likes growth over time
• Likes broken down into Unlikes, Organic Likes, Paid Likes and Net Likes
• Where Your Page Likes Came From: On Your Page, Page Suggestions, Mobile, Your Posts, Others

Post Reach
View the following:

• Post Reach: Broken down into Organic and Paid over time
• Likes, Comments and Shares over time
• Hide, Report as Spam and Unlikes over time
• Total Organic and Paid Reach over time

Page Visits
Some valuable data here that existed before, but was largely buried.

• Page and Tab Visits: By Timeline, Admin Tabs and individual tabs
• Other Page Activity: Mentions, Posts by other people, Checkins and Offers purchased
• External Referrers by website

3. Posts Tab

All Posts
This looks much like the table we’re used to seeing that documents performance of recent posts. The biggest difference is the new filtering mentioned earlier.

When Your Fans Are Online

Mentioned earlier.

Best Post Types

Mentioned earlier.

4. People Tab

Your Fans
You’ve seen this before…

People Reached
Not much new here…

People Engaged
Sure, it’s nothing new, but I love this info!

What Do You Think?

Do you like the changes Facebook made to Insights? Any other items you’d add to what’s new, what’s awesome and what sucks?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post The New Facebook Insights: What’s New, What’s Awesome and What Sucks appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Last Friday, I conducted a webinar about Advanced Facebook Insights strategies. It was dense and info-packed, but I still didn’t have the time I wanted to cover a couple of the topics in more detail.

Today I want to tackle one of those topics.

People often ask me what metrics I follow. While this should vary based on your goals, I have assembled a list of ratios that I monitor.

Understand that Facebook does not create these ratios for you. You’ll need to do a little bit of dirty work. But I’ve provided information on how you can calculate each ratio yourself.

Following are ratios that need to be on your radar, why they’re important and how you can calculate them yourself. Each one is on a post-level basis.

[A Facebook Insights glossary of terms can be found here.]

[Tweet “Do you monitor the wrong Facebook Insights metrics? Make sure to follow these 8 ratios…”]

1. Consumptions vs. Impressions

Stats Used:

• Lifetime Post Consumptions (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column T)
• Lifetime Post Total Impressions (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column L)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of times a post was clicked over the amount of times it was shown.

Why This Ratio is Important: This allows you to measure how well a particular post attracted clicks, regardless of how many people saw it. If you base success and failure on number of clicks only, you could overlook important factors that will significantly impact impressions that lead to those clicks, including time of day and day of the week.

2. Consumers vs. Reach

Stats Used:

• Lifetime Post Consumers (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column S)
• Lifetime Post Total Reach (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column H)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of users who clicked on a post over the number of users who saw it.

Why This Ratio is Important: See above. This is another way to measure how well a particular post attracted clicks. This time, however, it is not impacted by outlier users who may have influenced the results with a high number of clicks. The focus here is entirely around number of users instead of number of clicks.

3. Engaged Fans vs. Page Likes

Stats Used:

• Lifetime People who have liked your Page and engaged with your post (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column AA)
• Lifetime Total Likes (Page Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column H)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of your Fans who clicked anywhere on a post, whether they saw it or not.

Why This Ratio is Important: We often hear marketers complaining about the percentage of Fans they reached. My response is always, “What percentage of your Fans engaged?” This question tends to be met with silence. This gives you a much better idea of the percentage of your Fans who had any interest whatsoever in a post, whether it resulted in a story or not.

4. Engaged Fans vs. Fans Reached

Stats Used:

• Lifetime People who have liked your Page and engaged with your post (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column AA)
• Lifetime Post reach by people who like your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column X)

What This Ratio Means: Of those Fans reached, percentage who clicked anywhere on a post.

Why This Ratio is Important: Very slight variation from the ratio above. This time we’re measuring engaged users over Fans who were reached instead of total number of Fans. This could help give you a better idea of the true success of a post in the eyes of your Fans while cutting out factors like day of the week and time of day.

5. Fans Reached vs. Page Likes

Stats Used:

• Lifetime Post reach by people who like your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column X)
• Lifetime Total Likes (Page Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column H)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of your Fans who were reached with a particular post.

Why This Ratio is Important: Oh, it’s the Facebook Marketing Special. I’m actually not that interested in this, but I know everyone else is. What percentage of your Fans were surfaced a particular post? This can be influenced by level of engagement. Can also be influenced by a long list of things, including time of day and day of the week. Always remember that half of your Fans won’t be on Facebook during the day you publish a post.

6. Fan Stories vs. Fan Impressions

Stats Used:

• Lifetime Post Stories by people who have liked your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column AB)
• Lifetime Post Impressions by people who have liked your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column W)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of times your post was shown to Fans that resulted in a story in friend News Feeds.

Why This Ratio is Important: While any clicks give you an idea of raw number of people who expressed interest in your content, clicks that result in stories are even more important since they help your post go viral. This post focuses on those most important clicks (comments, likes, shares, claims, etc.).

7. Fans Talking About This vs. Page Likes

Stats Used:

• Lifetime People talking about your post by those who have liked your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column AC)
• Lifetime Total Likes (Page Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column H)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of your Fans who have created a story about a particular post, whether they saw it or not.

Why This Ratio is Important: This ratio cuts out the outlier Fans who created multiple stories so that you can focus on the percentage of Fans who created at least one story. This gives a good gauge of true impact of a post on your Fans.

8. Fans Talking About This vs. Fans Reached

Stats Used:

• Lifetime People talking about your post by those who have liked your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column AC)
• Lifetime Post reach by people who like your Page (Post Level Export, Key Metrics Tab, Column X)

What This Ratio Means: Percentage of your Fans reached who created a story about a particular post.

Why This Ratio is Important: Only difference between this ratio and the one above is that it doesn’t punish a post for reaching fewer people. It helps level out factors like time of day and day of week.

The post Facebook Insights: Monitor These 8 Ratios appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

When marketers discuss Facebook Insights measurements, there are two words that cross their lips most often: Reach and Engagement.

Meanwhile, there are two terms that go completely ignored. They’re nowhere to be found within the web version of Facebook Insights. They’re only found within Insights exports.

Consumers and Consumptions.

The reason few marketers discuss these metrics could be partially due to the fact that so few understand what they mean. And Facebook can be blamed for this, not only because the definition isn’t incredibly clear but because there is another term that is defined in nearly exact terms which causes significant confusion.

What are Consumers and Consumptions?

Within Insights export files, Facebook defines Consumers as follows:

The number of unique users who clicked anywhere in your post. Clicks generating stories are included in “Other Clicks.”

If you dig into the individual tabs for Consumers and Consumptions within the exports, you’ll find columns for Link Clicks, Other Clicks, Photo Views and Video Plays.

The Page Level export adds one other point of clarity:

Stories generated without clicks on page content (e.g., liking the page in Timeline) are not included.

I’m going to look at this a bit more closely in a minute, but the main thing to understand here is that Consumptions measure any click on Page content, whether it generates a Story or not.

Based on the definitions above, the following are considered Consumptions of a Page post:

• Link Clicks
• Photo Views
• Video Plays
• Post Comments
• Post Likes
• Post Shares

The clicks above are those that Facebook measures and tracks in Insights. But based on the definition of “clicked anywhere,” we’re not covering everything here.

Here is the data within an Insights export. Note that items like comments, likes and shares are included within “Other Clicks.”

One can assume this also includes:

• Clicking in the Comment box, but not commenting
• Expanding to view comments
• Clicking a user profile link
• Clicking a tag
• Clicking in a way that does not yield results (??)
• Reporting or marking a user comment as spam (??)
• Reporting or marking the post as spam (??)

As you can see, I’m not completely clear here. But Facebook does say that it includes “clicks anywhere.” So if we are to take that definition literally, it should include every item listed above, including when our post is hidden or reported as spam.

Even though there’s some ambiguity here, it’s quite clear that these measurements are extremely important and need to be monitored by marketers. I believe strongly that they are far more important than the almighty “Reach” metric, which gets far more attention (more on that later).

Consumers vs. Engaged Users Confusion

Now the problem. Here is Facebook’s definition for Engaged User, first from post level:

The number of unique users who clicked anywhere in your posts.

And now Page level:

The number of unique users who engaged with your Page. Engagement includes any click or story created.

Uh… okay.

Consumers are people who “click anywhere” within your posts or Page content. Engaged Users are people who “clicked anywhere in your posts.” So what the heck is the difference?

I reached out to several knowledgeable people in Facebook marketing who work closely with these stats, and I couldn’t get a clear and definitive answer from anyone.

In fact, it seems that the answer has changed over time. Based on an article by Josh Constine for InsideFacebook back in 2011, it appears that Consumptions once meant “The number of people who clicked on any of your content without generating a story.” That is definitely no longer the case.

But I believe the answer lies within the extra line that exists in the Consumers definition for Page level metrics. One more time…

Stories generated without clicks on page content (e.g., liking the page in Timeline) are not included.

This stumped me at first, but it now makes sense. Engagement includes all clicks and all stories generated about your Page. Consumption includes all clicks, whether they result in a story or not.

Clear as mud?

This is the distinction: Engagement includes stories generated that were not the result of a click within your content. Consumption does not. As a result, Engagement is always equal or higher.

Now, this is not confirmed, but I believe the following would be examples of stories that did not result from a click on Page content:

• User post that tags/mentions your Page and was not written on your Timeline
• Checkin executed via mobile device without navigating to your Page
• Liking your Page from a user generated story — not from your Page or Page content
• ??

The example Facebook gives of “liking the page in Timeline” doesn’t clarify things for me. Whose Timeline? The Page or a user? It raises more questions than it provides answers.

And I know there are items missing from my list here since none of them are on the post level. I can’t think of a single example of a story generated from engagement with a Page post that is not the result of a click. Can you??

While it certainly would be helpful to know this, we at least now understand the difference between an Engaged User and a Consumer. They are identical in that both include any click within your Page or post, whether they do or do not result in a story. The only difference is that Engaged User also includes stories that weren’t the result of a click.

So the real question is this: Why in the world are both stats necessary?

Your guess is as good as mine. But Facebook actually provides more details for Consumers and Consumptions within the exports (providing columns for Consumption types) than Engaged Users (no such detail). So it’s my belief that we need to start using the terms “Consumer” and “Consumption” to be more accurate and consistent across the board.

Reach Replacement: No More Fuzzy Metrics

The jury is out on the value of the Reach metric. Some think it’s valuable. Some even use it as a determining factor when running ads.

I think these people are crazy. Reach is a fuzzy and inexact metric that measures the number of people who may have seen your content.

But isn’t the Consumers metric what we actually want here?

We know that those who clicked anywhere within our post saw it. There is no disputing that. There is no fuzziness.

What’s nice is that this metric doesn’t only include the Storytellers (those who created a story by commenting, liking or sharing). It includes the Lurkers as well, assuming they clicked anywhere within the post.

How many people saw my post? At least X [the number of people who consumed it]. The number of total people who saw it will be higher. But this is the starting point to determine the number of people who had any interest whatsoever in my content.

From there, we can start getting creative with our metrics:

• Consumers / Total Fans: What percentage of your Fans consumed your post?
• Talking About This / Consumers: What percentage of Consumers created a story?
• Stories / Consumptions: What percentage of Consumptions resulted in a story?
• Link Clicks / Consumptions: What percentage of Consumers clicked your link?
• Shares / Consumptions: What percentage of Consumers shared your content?

This is real data here, people. This is actionable data that means something.

My Free Insights Webinar

On March 22, I will be holding a free webinar to cover these and other advanced topics associated with Facebook Insights.

The post Facebook Insights: Consumer vs. Engaged User appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

It’s important to take a break every now and then to challenge conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom says that to optimize the effectiveness of links, you should either include them within text connected to a Photo or within a text post (Status Update).

Conventional wisdom says that the reasons for this are lower Reach and Engagement rates from the standard Link share (update with title, description and thumbnail).

We already know that Reach numbers need to be questioned. But what about Engagement?

The purpose of this post is to prove why you should go back to sharing links the way Facebook had intended. I’ll do that with a little help from my data.

Why You Share Links

We marketers are so easily distracted. We’re always looking for the latest shiny object. The newest quick fix. The weakness that can be exploited.

As a result, we have also lost track of why we share links in the first place: To drive traffic.

Sure, you want to start a conversation as well. Likes, comments and shares are good (with shares being great).

But particularly if you’re sharing your own content, the main goal when sharing a link is to drive traffic to your website.

Guess what? Facebook tracks link clicks. They track link clicks either within a typical Link Share, within a Status Update, within the text connected to Photos and within comments.

So if you wanted, you could actually compare the effectiveness of driving link clicks with each post type.

I have a feeling we’re about to do just that!

My Data

It’s always important to open with this: My data is a very small sample size. I represent only one Facebook Page (Jon Loomer Digital). It may not represent your data.

But what I found is convincing enough that I’d be surprised if you’re seeing something significantly different.

I took more than a year’s worth of data on my Page from February 2012 through February 2013. I then cleaned up the data by doing the following:

• Removed any posts that received promotion;
• Focused only on Status Updates, Link Shares and Photos;
• Removed all posts that were targeted by location or language;
• Focused only on the Photos and Status Updates that included a link within the text.

The result is a pool of 588 pieces of content from which I can compare, broken down as follows:

• Link Shares: 410
• Photo Shares: 158
• Status Updates: 20

Obviously, the Status Updates are a very small sample size. But you’ll quickly notice that plenty can be learned from those 20 updates.

Facebook provides number of Link Clicks within the Consumers and Consumptions tabs of the Post Level Insights export. I will use Consumers since the focus here is on unique users for all data.

Note that the Link Clicks that Facebook tracks include clicks on links within the comments of posts as well. While I went through my data line-by-line to only focus on the posts that had links within the main text, I can’t separate the clicks within comments of the posts included in my final data. But I will point out a couple of scenarios where there is a link shared in the comments of a post that also includes a link.

Since my number of Fans increased significantly (from 1,889 to 9,586) during this period of time, I will be focusing on ratios over number of Fans.

[NOTE: Watch the video at the bottom of this post to learn how to find this data.]

Difference in Reach

A hot topic of late has been the high Reach of Status Updates when compared to Photos and Links. Here’s an example of my Reach from May 1, 2012 through January 31, 2013 (from yesterday’s blog post):

As you can see above, the Reach of my posts in general has favored Status Updates.

The Total Reach for the data used in today’s experiment is broken down as follows (Total Reach / Total Fans):

• Status Updates: 39.44%
• Photos: 28.34%
• Links: 26.69%

It’s important to remember that the numbers above don’t represent the Total Reach of ALL Photos and Status Updates shared from my Facebook Page. It only includes those qualified posts (as explained earlier) that include a link within the text.

The percentages above show exactly why so many marketers have been using Status Updates lately to share links (meaning the link is shared in plain text without a thumbnail, title and description).

The thought is that this significantly higher Reach leads to better results.

Difference in Engagement

Of course, before the latest trend was using Status Updates to increase Reach, the hot thing was to attach links within the text of a Photo.

The thought here was that using a photo brought more attention to the eye. Additionally, such a post would take up more room in the News Feed. These things, we have been told over and over again, would lead to more Engagement (clicks within posts).

So now let’s take a look at how Engagement is broken down within my data (Engaged Users / Total Fans).

• Photos: 1.38%
• Status Updates: 1.01%
• Links: .92%

This supports everything we’ve been hearing. If you want engagement, share Photos!

WHOA! Difference in Link Clicks

Here’s the problem with this line of thinking: Focusing on Reach and general Engagement doesn’t help us measure whether we are reaching the intended goal of the post (in this case, driving traffic with the link).

So how about those link clicks?

Even the raw data is eye-opening. I sorted all of my qualifying 588 posts in order of link clicks. The top 356 were all Link shares (this is not a typo).

The first non-Link share that showed up was a Status Update with a grand total of four link clicks (for comparison’s sake, there were 58 Link Shares that had at least 50 link clicks). But guess what? That post also had a link within the comments, so it’s not clear how many clicks there actually were on the link within the Status Update.

[NOTE: I know what you’re thinking because I was thinking it, too. Is Facebook not tracking the links within the text of Photos and Status Updates, tracking only those within comments? Nope. There are several such posts that don’t have links within comments that do show link clicks. And there are also such posts that I promoted that got far more link clicks.]

Even the second Status Update on the list had a link shared in the comments. While my standard Link shares were generating an average of about 25 link clicks, the Status Updates and Photos averaged fewer than 1.0.

Let’s take a look at the average number of link clicks by post type (Link Clicks / Total Fans):

• Link Shares: .455%
• Status Updates: .006%
• Photos: .003%

I had to go to a third decimal place, otherwise Photos would be rounded to .00%. Link Shares resulted in 159 times more link clicks than Photos with attached links and 73 times more link clicks than such a Status Update.

These numbers are ridiculous. Obvious. I shouldn’t need to waste more than a few words making my argument, but I’m so shocked by the disparities that I’m going to waste those words on expressing my shock.

If I am looking to drive traffic to my website with a post, there is absolutely no reason to share that post as a Status Update or Photo. None.

Status Updates generate more than 50% the Reach than Link Shares. Photos similarly result in more than 50% the Engagement. But neither of those post types come close to satisfying the number of link clicks of a good, old fashioned Link Share.

Quite frankly, I hate myself for taking as long as I did to move entirely to Link Shares for driving traffic. I wasted countless opportunities to drive traffic to my website.

The Science

So the immediate question is Why? Why would users be so much more likely to click on the normal Link Share as opposed to a link that’s in the text of a Status Update or Photo?

When you include a link within the Status Update or Photo text, you are wanting someone to click that small area to be redirected to your site. Like this…

But a link? Click anywhere within a box that is approximately 379 x 116 pixels and you’ll be directed to my site…

Which link would you be more likely to click?

Your Turn

As convincing as my numbers are, they of course don’t necessarily mean you are seeing the same thing.

I encourage you to do your own research. Pull several Post Level Exports. Remove the promoted content. Find those Status Updates and Photos that you created to share links. Then find which posts generated the most link clicks.

What are you seeing? Do you plan on changing your posting habits when it comes to sharing links?

Watch the tutorial below to learn how you can find your link click data!

The post Stop Using Facebook Text Updates and Photos to Share Links appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There’s an awful lot of anger bubbling up over an apparent change in EdgeRank that is limiting visibility of posts for some brand Pages. With anger often comes irrationality.

I should be able to reach 100% of my Fans!

I’ve seen that sentence, nearly word-for-word, more times than I care to count. It’s simply ridiculous.

Before I get to the hidden reason why this is ridiculous, the obvious reasons:

• Only half of your Fans are on Facebook during the day you created your post
• Others who are online weren’t within a several hour window to see your post
• Some of your “Fans” are fake profiles or dead accounts

Sure, the third may be included in the first. But all are worth mentioning to underscore just how impossible it is to reach “all” or even “half” of your Facebook Fans on a given day.

And I haven’t even gotten to the “Fans” who have chosen to never see your content again.

The Silent Killer of Reach

The typical user who bores of your content will simply unlike your Page. This is actually good for you. Not only does it send a signal about your content, it helps to optimize your audience. You don’t need these people.

Trim the fat.

The action that can kill your Reach: Hide All.

It’s actually not even called “Hide All” anymore. It’s still called that within Facebook Insights, but “Hide” is only related to single posts now.

To hide all of a Page’s future content, I now need to hover over the Liked button for a given Page and uncheck “Show in News Feed.” I can do this either while viewing an individual post or when going to that brand’s Page.

The big problem with the people who do this is that they kill your numbers. You will never reach them. They will undoubtedly be a Fan long past the time you stop managing your Page (because they’ll never be reminded of your annoyance), but they won’t see your content. Ever.

This means that your total Like count is somewhat padded. And depending on the size of this padding, it will negatively impact the percentage of Fans who like, comment, share or are even reached.

How to Check Your Hide All Count

Facebook doesn’t make this particularly easy, but you can find it. There is some work involved, particularly if your Page has been around for a while.

Go to your Admin Panel > Insights > Export Data. Then select Page Level Data and enter a range of about 200 days. I’ve gotten errors when requesting much more than that.

Within that document, run a quick search for “hide_all” (include that underscore) and search the entire workbook, not just the sheet. The first result is for the Daily Negative Feedback tab and Column D is the one you should be focused on.

Go to the cell below the last item in Row C and enter the following formula:

=SUM(D:D)

That will tell you how many people have hidden all of your posts from their News Feeds.

[Note: Sometimes, columns C and D are switched. No idea why. But keep an eye on it.]

Of course, that’s just this document. You’ll need to run additional exports until you get to the date when your Page was created.

Will some of these people have also unliked your Page? I guess so. But that would presumably be extremely rare.

How Much Dead Weight Do You Have?

I asked my Fans this question and received a wide range of answers. However, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my percentage of “Hide All” Fans is higher than any other shared with me.

In about one year, 398 people have hidden all of my posts. This is almost 6% of my total Fan count.

I considered not even reporting that. But full transparency and stuff.

And hell… If I’m at that immediate disadvantage, I should be one of the people screaming about Reach, right? Well, I’m not. So I guess there’s actually something to be proud of there.

Additionally, this has quite a lot to do with my strategy of posting multiple times per day. Some people will hate that. Most will unlike my Page as a result. Others take this approach of hiding all (bastards!).

There really isn’t a “good” or “bad” percentage. If your percentage is too low, it may be because you aren’t posting often enough. Or maybe you aren’t controversial enough (meaning: you don’t have a voice). You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t aim to.

Where This is Leading…

There’s a reason why I wanted to find out this number. Everyone is complaining about feeling we should reach “all” or even “most” of our Fans. But I’m convinced that not even promotion will get any of us close to that number.

I want to find out the following:

How many of my Fans were online on the day that I created this post and scrolled through a time period where they could have seen it — but didn’t?

That’s the bottom line. That’s what I want to know. Until I know more about what that number is, I’m not convinced that EdgeRank is harming me.

And this is really just the surface of the things I’d like to know.

How many of my Fans are completely inactive this month? How many weren’t on today? How many were on today, but not when I posted?

The problem, of course, is that there’s no current measure to find out. The only number I can get is the “Hide All” total.

So what’s your Hide All percentage? Don’t be bashful. And don’t just post to brag. Someone’s gotta have a higher percentage than me! Share below!

The post Some of Your Facebook Fans Will Never See Your Posts Again appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook has made it clear that it will be taking more aggressive steps to remove misclassified personal profiles used for business purposes. As a result, millions of business owners who are incorrectly using personal Facebook profiles to market their businesses are confronted with two choices: 1) Convert your personal profile to a business Page, or 2) risk getting deleted.

It’s not particularly surprising to me that there are holdouts who aren’t going down without a fight. They insist that using a personal profile is better for their business than a Facebook Page. This post is for you.

You’re only hurting yourself and your business. There’s a long list of reasons why a Facebook Page is better for you than a personal profile. If, after reading this, you still don’t get it… well… Maybe getting deleted isn’t such a bad thing.

Here is just a sampling of the many benefits associated with a Facebook business Page over a personal profile.

‎1) Facebook Insights: Access to Mounds of Data

Let me get this straight… As a business on a personal Facebook profile, you have no access to Facebook Insights. You are unable to export and digest the thousands of rows and columns of information that can help you understand your customer, what they like and don’t like, where they are from and when they are online.

So, what… you go by gut instinct? How exactly do you measure success and failure? If you’re a serious business, you need hard data to drive your strategy. And if you don’t have hard data, you aren’t a serious business.

2) Facebook Tabs and Contests

With Facebook tabs, you can use apps to explain more about who you are. Provide a video introduction. Feature your products. Provide a newsletter opt-in form. Highlight the history of your company.

Without this on a personal profile, how exactly do you do this? You’re limited only to your posts to tell your story and sell your products.

Oh, and how exactly do you plan to run contests from a personal profile? You can’t. Not, of course, without violating Facebook terms. But I guess at this point, you don’t care a whole lot about Facebook’s terms.

3) Facebook Offers

Using a Facebook profile? Whoops, you can’t use Facebook Offers. So good luck on your strategy of pasting a link, driving them to your website to promote your deal.

4) Profiles Limited to 5,000 “Friends”

I don’t care if you’re a small business with only one location. Everyone has plans to grow, and every business should have the potential growth to want to reach more than 5,000 people on Facebook. If you do, you’ll need to scale.

5) Profiles Look Unprofessional

It looks sloppy. It’s bad planning. It screams, I don’t know what I’m doing! And these are not the messages that you want to be sending to customers and potential customers.

6) Access to Advertising

You know, that EdgeRank Bogeyman. The truth is that EdgeRank impacts personal profiles as well as business Pages. By default, your “friends” are set to view “most” of your updates (not “all”).

Do you think your posts are reaching more than 16% of your “friends” with your personal profile? Prove it. Oh, wait. You don’t have Facebook Insights.

If you use a Facebook Page, you can reach more of your Fans and you can reach friends of those Fans with Promoted Posts. You can create ads that target people with relevant interests and attract new fans and new customers.

You can do all of this on a very minimal budget. If you’re serious about growing your business, reaching new people and selling your products, you should be open to Facebook advertising.

7) Privacy Considerations

Maybe you aren’t concerned about the privacy of your customers. Maybe you are ticked by the fact that you have no access to this private information as a business Page.

But my guess is that if you were to poll your customers, they don’t want you to have access to this stuff. By using a profile instead of a Page, you’re inviting privacy complaints.

8) Ability to Assign Admin Roles

• Insights Analyst: View Insights
• Advertiser: View Insights and create ads
• Moderator: All of the above, plus send messages as the Page and respond to and delete comments
• Content Creator: All of the above, plus create posts as the Page, edit the Page and add apps
• Manager: All of the Above, plus Manage Admin Roles

If you have an employee or multiple employees who you want to help manage the account, you simply assign roles to them. You would make them “Content Creators” or “Moderators” so that if they leave the company on bad terms, they don’t destroy your business’ reputation in the process.

If you need help with advertising, you can also bring in a consultant and assign them the Advertiser role. Or only allow someone to see statistics as an Insights Analyst.

What do you do if you are using a personal profile? Give them your username and password. Good luck with that.

9) Native Facebook Scheduling

If you are promoting your business as a Facebook profile, you don’t have access to native scheduling. Sure, you could use a third party tool, but your posts will always appear with that third party’s formatting and icon. It will be clear that it wasn’t posted from Facebook.

It simply looks better when your posts come from Facebook. The difference in engagement may not be huge, but there is a difference.

10) Connection to Facebook Places

By setting up your business as a Place, customers can also check in, alerting their friends that they are at your store or restaurant. This is a great way to allow your customers to naturally promote your business.

Oh, you’re using a personal profile? You don’t have access to this. Maybe you have a separate Place because a customer was nice enough to set it up, but it won’t be connected to your profile. Bad form.

11) Business Relevant Information

It’s just silly. When you set up a business as a personal profile, your business now has a gender and a birthday. When you set it up as a business Page, it has a category, a mission statement, products, awards and Founded date. No birthday. No gender.

If you want your customer to learn more about your company and what you do, set up a business Page. If you don’t, set up a birthday and gender.

12) Business Relevant Options

With a business Page, you can restrict your audience by country and age. You have access to moderation and profanity blacklists to control the conversation.

You set up your business as a personal profile? No access to this stuff.

13) Use of Third Party Tools

These tools also assume you set up your business the right way with a Facebook Page. Set up as a personal profile? No such access.

14) Avoid Being Shut Down

Well, then risk getting shut down. If running your business through your profile is so great, you will lose something of value. Facebook will take it away.

If what you are doing is something worth keeping, you need to convert your profile to a Page. If you are not concerned about that risk, it tells me that your efforts were never worth saving to begin with.

What do you think? Are there other benefits to using a business Page over a personal profile? List them below!

The post 14 Benefits of a Facebook Business Page Over a Personal Profile appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.