Five Reasons Your Brand Posts Are Fading on Facebook

Brand Post Reach on Facebook Dips to 6%

Average organic reach of content published on brand Facebook pages plunged from 12.1% in October 2013 to 6.2% in February, according to an analysis of 106 country-level brand pages by Social@Oglvy.com

Content Overload is Diminishing Returns

More Friends, More Status Updates

A Pew Research Center study conducted in summer of 2013 showed adult American Facebook users had an average of 338 Facebook friends. A rise from Pew’s 2010 study average of 229 friends.

People Follow More Than Just You

According to a study done by Socialbakers in September 2013, Facebook users who are active on a monthly basis “liked” an average of 40 pages, which produces about 1,440 updates from a mix of brands per month. In comparison, in 2009, the average number of pages liked was under 5, yielding only 23 brand updates per month.

Brands Are Competing with All Brands, Not Their Competition

Brand Networks reports that within the last year Coca-Cola has grown their fan count by 32%, Red Bull by 18% and Starbucks by 7%. More interest in brand pages indicates that brands are competing with one another for a slice of every user’s news feed space.

Current Events and Pop Culture Get Pushed on Facebook Users

In December of 2013 Facebook acknowledged that it had tweaked its news-feed algorithms to value links to articles from media organizations, especially to mobile users, as part of their plan to make content more appealing to users.

Facebook Users See Ads for Brands

While in July of 2013 Facebook Founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that about 5% of news-feed posts were ads and that click-through rates had remained stable as news-feed ad volume grew.

Sortable Facebook Timelines

The new default Timeline for Facebook users is another driving force to push users into what is supposed to be the most relevant content, though not necessarily the most current. While the idea may sound good on paper, the implementation has been anything but, as users have been very vocal about how, “It REALLY irritates me when a year old post jumps to the top of my news-feed just because someone commented on it.”

A Facebook engineer explained the competitive environment last summer when he cited internal research showing that 1,500 pieces of content are eligible to appear every time a daily user logs into the network. Each day, an average of 300 “stories” are then prioritized by news-feed algorithms to appear to that user.

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