Facebook Why Your Organic Reach is Down

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Facebook Business Page Reach or the lack of has long been a hot topic among business owners. Over the years a lot of business owners have said that their Facebook Reach is down and they are finding it harder to get their content in front of fans. Many also state that it’s because Facebook is deliberatly making them pay to advertise. Well Brian Boland, who leads the Ads Product Marketing team at Facebook has written a Blog post all about why.

To sum up the two key points:

More content is being created and shared every day.

At any one time there are on average 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log on to Facebook. For those with a lot of friends and Page likes this can be as many as 15,000. As a result, competition in a users News Feed, the place on Facebook where they view content from their family and friends, as well as businesses is increasing, and it’s becoming increasingly harder for any story to gain exposure in News Feed.

An infographic by SumoCoupon shows what Facebook’s billion-plus users do in the average minute, such as share 3.2 million posts, send 150,000 messages and upload 243,000 photos.

Infographic showing what happens every minute on Facebook

Facebook News Feed is designed to show users relevant content

Rather than showing all possible content and flooding your Feed, the News Feed is designed to show the content that’s most relevant to them. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see when they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story using EdgeRank. EdgeRank basically looks at thousands of factors relative to each person and determines what is most relevant to them. Over the past year, Facebook have made some important changes to how EdgeRank works and what content it chooses to display in your news Feed.

  • Better at showing high-quality content
  • Cleaned up News Feed spam

As a result of these changes, News Feed is becoming more engaging, even as the amount of content being shared on Facebook continues to grow.
The next questions is:

Is organic reach dropping because Facebook is trying to make more money?

Facebook say No.

“Our goal is always to provide the best experience for the people that use Facebook. We believe that delivering the best experiences for people also benefits the businesses that use Facebook. If people are more active and engaged with stories that appear in News Feed, they are also more likely to be active and engaged with content from businesses.”

 

So how do I improve my Reach?

As always, producing good quality content that people want to read, like and share will increase your Facebook Reach.

Compfight – Flickr search for Creative Commons license Images

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Creative Commons license search tool – Compfight

Blogging involves not just writing good copy but also using good imagery.

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog. They also catch attention when people share your post on Facebook or other social media platforms. This is all very well but good photography doesn’t come cheap and if you are paying for images from Royalty free sites like fotolia.com then it can quickly add up.

Enter Compfight

Images are a great Social Media Tool - Compfight searches Flickr

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast.

Enter Compfight. Compfight searches Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use and even provides you with the HTML code for proper attribution.

There’s a good FAQ guide and link to the Flickr Creative Commons licence page so you can fully understand how the licences work and what your rights are and how to use the images.

 

 

Feedly and Buffer – Essential News and Social Media Scheduling Tools

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News Feed Readers & Social Media Scheduling Apps

Do you use them? We do and we find them essential for not only keeping up to date with our industry but also provifing quality content for our Social Media fans & followers. News Feeds (Aggregators) basically allow you to add websites, Blogs & RSS feeds to your account so that any new content published shows up in your feed. You can quickly scan through the summary and if you find it interesting, click on it and read more. Social Media schedulers like Buffer allow you add photos, posts and links to a queue and then schedule them to Social Media platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn & Twitter.

What do we use?

We use Feedly & Buffer. Since the demise of Google Reader, the most popular news feed aggregator out there, we’ve been looking for a suitable alternative and we think we’ve found it.

Feedly

Feedly allows you to easily search for and add news feeds from Blogs, Websites & RSS feeds. So what’s so great about it? Well, firstly it’s free and secondly, it’s so simple to sign up for and use it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to be up and running and thirdly it’s brilliant. You can easily search for keywords, #hashtags, @usernames or specific website or Blog names so it won’t take you long to build a stack of good quality, relevant feeds of interest to both you and your users.

You can group the feeds under topics to organise them according to the subject type, for example we have Design, Social Media & Tech and then browse all of the feeds, by group or individually. Feedley news aggregator used in conjunction with Buffer Clicking on a feed will bring up the full article including images and if you then want to read it on the original page, click the title again and it will take you that site.

It’s all pretty self explanatory so we won’t go into great detail on how and what to do. Suffice to say that if you want a good quality browser based app that automatically feeds you stories and articles from your favourite sites then Feedly is the one for you.

Buffer

Now, we are totally in love with Buffer, even more so since they added Google+ pages to their list of feeds yesterday. It is so easy to use, does what it says on the tin and the support is just superb and all this from an app that is free (you can pay to “go awesome” if you want extra features and queue storage and we are tempted).

Buffer works best if you install the browser extension. We use Chrome so this was an easy process and it gives you a Buffer icon in the top right of your browser. If you’re not using Chrome as your Web browser we highly recommend you do You can download Chrome here.

Once you find a news item, post, image or tweet you want to share, either via Feedly or while browsing the web, Twitter, Facebook or pretty much anywhere. Click the Buffer icon and up pops a screen allowing you to edit the post and then either post now to your chosen feeds or Buffer it which adds it to your buffer queue.

The app for scheduling posts to yourSocial Media

Click image to see a larger annotated version.

Your Buffer queue can have multiple posting schedules for each feed. So for instance you have Twitter posting 3 times a day and Facebook just the once. Choosing the time to post is easy using a drop down menu and halting the queue is as simple as clicking on each of the days so they go green.

It really is very simple to use.

There are loads of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buffer and rather than repeating them here we are going to link you to an excellent post by  from Buffer which lists the
The Top 10 Secret Buffer Hacks and Features: Supercharge your Social Sharing in 2013

Facebook Algorithm Updated – No more begging for likes or crappy memes

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Facebook Algorithm updated to reduce Like begging and crappy memes

Facebook announced last week (23rd August) that they are making changes to the News Feed Algorithm (EdgeRank) which should reduce the number of “Click Like if you love cats” or crappy memes you see in your News Feed.

Facebook’s aim is to make sure that the best quality content is being produced, surfaced and shared. Their latest update to the News Feed ranking algorithm helps ensure that the organic content people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.

Facebook Algorithm changes: An example of an image "Like Begging"

So how did they go about changing the Facebook Algorithm?

“While the goal of News Feed is to show high quality posts to people, we wanted to better understand what high quality means. To do this we decided to develop a new algorithm to factor into News Feed.

To develop it, we first surveyed thousands of people to understand what factors make posts from Pages high quality.

Some of the questions we asked included:”

  • Is this timely and relevant content?
  • Is this content from a source you would trust?
  • Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
  • Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)
  • Would you call this a low quality post or meme?
  • Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?

Once they had the results in they developed a new Facebook algorithm, and then tested it with a small segment of their users and found:

  • By showing these high quality posts higher up in News Feed, we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content
  • People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall

These results suggest that this change shows more people higher quality content, and more interesting stories from the Pages they are connected to and Facebook will be rolling out this update to everyone over the next few weeks.

Will this affect my Facebook page?

If your Facebook posts consist mainly of begging for likes or memes then yes, the changes to the Facebook Algorithm will affect you. You will probably see a reduction in your reach, but if you continue to provide good quality content that people want to read and engage with then no, it will be business as usual.

Buffer now lets you share to Google+ pages

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Fantastic news Google+ has now been added as a feed to Buffer.

Our favourite posts scheduling app Buffer has just been updated with the Google+ API and you can now schedule your posts to Google+ as well as Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.

The email has just dropped in to our Inbox and as with the feeds, connecting to Google+ was easy and took a matter of seconds.

Here’s the Buffer announcement about Google+

 

An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next.

It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone.

Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+ Page up to date.

And they have written a guide with lots of pictures to help you add Google+ to your Buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/introducing-buffer-for-google-plus-pages-scheduling-posting-social-media

You can now use Buffer to post to Google+

Not using Buffer?

Well you should. Buffer is a great way to quickly and easily schedule your posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter & now Google+. By installing their Google Chrome app, when you spot a story or image you would like to post about. just click the Buffer icon and that’s it. If you want to change, add or edit the wording then that’s easy as well.

You can set up multiple  posting schedules for each Social Media Feed. So say twice a day for Twitter and once for Facebook. It really is a fantastic and best of all it is completely FREE!

Here’s that link again… bufferapp.com