There’s a widespread misunderstanding up and down this particularly large land mass that having 100,000 Facebook fans means having 100,000 people you can happily push free marketing messages to. This is entirely wrong.
Rest assured I’m not going to add to the gigabytes of data written about the need for personal relationships or 2-way dialogues. No I’m referring to the hugely misunderstood fact that no matter what you post you may well never reach up to 95% of them.
There is a little known fact that Facebook employs a post ranking and filtering technology which industry nerds call Edegrank (though Facebook apparently don’t call it that themselves). Edegrank determines what posts should appear on your News Feed by looking at the number of ‘edges’ each receives – an ‘edge’ being a ‘Like’, ‘Comment’ or ‘Share’. Typically 85%-95% of all brand posts never get through which means that whilst you might be mighty chuffed with having attained your 100,000 fans, more like 5,000 are likely to be receiving your posts.
I really don’t believe this to be a case of Facebook being mischievous. If the 12% of the planet on Facebook received every update about ‘having a cup of tea’ from every ‘Friend’, we would have experienced backwards evolution into apes by now. Facebook clearly needs to employ a system to sort the sharable wheat from the moronic chaff. It’s not different to how Google has an algorithm to work out what should come top or really just not bother to appear at all within your search results.
What this means is that anyone involved in Facebook pages – and well that’s pretty much all of us – needs to understand the importance of developing an earned, owned and paid strategy. Yes POEM has its detractors (of which I’m usually one) but it’s pretty handy in identifying the three core approaches needed to give your page the chance to become the incredible social platform you were once promised.
Earned:
To give your ‘organic’ posts the best chance of getting through Edgerank you need to be sure to craft every one so it generates the maximum number of edges. A new discipline to optimise this has even sprung up called News Feed Optimisation (NFO). However, rather than needing another term it really just means getting the basics right, including setting clear objectives for the page (shocking how few actually have any), tone of voice, editorial style, content scheduling, workflow and governance.
Owned:
Unless you’re Starbucks and people just continually post how much they love you (seriously – why do they do this?), it’s going to be a good idea to spike interest with some kick-ass social content. There are so many great examples but perhaps none beat Nike’s "The Chance". The renewed 2012 version recently kicked off so well worth checking out.
Paid:
Even with the finest earned and owned approach on the interweb, you are still going to reach just 15% or so of your audience. So you’re going to need to buy Facebook ads to reach the other 75%. The new Premium ads format completely ruins this article’s flow as they very cleverly combine earned engagement with owned content whilst you of course have to, er pay for them… Early results are very impressive with 5 to 10 times engagement rates being seen. Plus they can also now be served on mobiles which is a great opportunity.
So if this whole Edgerank thing is news then don’t despair. Facebook is still arguably the most powerful CRM platform that’s ever been created. But like every digital channel it needs to be carefully managed through a balanced strategy to get the most out of it.
James Filmer
Chief Digital Officer
UM
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