Travel companies may be scratching their heads over a sudden drop in attention to their Facebook fan pages – a problem TravelRepublic has admitted to this week.
The UK-based online travel agency says it has experienced a huge drop in impressions from messages it has posted on its Facebook page over the past few months.
Typically, it claims, a message would get 100,000 “impressions” (number of times an update is seen on the fan page wall and in the news feed of fans) on each of its messages, but data has shown the figure plummet to around 50,000 per message.
This is against the backdrop of the number of customers becoming fans of the page increasing to over 50,000 in recent months.
TravelRepublic reckons it has fallen victim to a recent change to settings on Facebook where users can opt to only see messages in their timelines from friends or fan pages they interact with the most, rather than all their connections.
Users are being urged – via a message on the TravelRepublic page – to change their settings, although the company concedes many of those fans will obviously not see the message anyway.
Clearly incensed by the change, TravelRepublic says it has recently contacted Facebook to try and discuss the matter further.
“We’re pretty confident that we’re not alone in being a brand with a sizeable Facebook following who is troubled by this large reduction in the level of interaction with its fans. It will be interesting to see what they say.”
Hi Kevin, Thanks for following up on our blog post http://blog.travelrepublic.co.uk/engagement-with-our-facebook-fans-down-50-after-news-feed-change.
What is particularly frustrating about this is that it seems like large numbers of Facebook users have had their news feed default automatically set to show posts from “Friends and pages you interact with most” (rather than “All of your friends and pages”) without them realising. As a result, content which they would previously have seen is being hidden from them without their knowledge.
Will let you know as and when we hear back from Facebook!
I work for a travel company and i know what really hurts. However, i personally disabled those ads. I think there are 2 parts to the story. Facebook settings, good if they work it out and facebook puts them back on where they belonged. My my FB looked like a bulletin board of deals and i had scram between all these publicity messages and find my friend updates. I like you means i like you, but it shouldnt mean i like you enough to disturb me once or twice a day. Limiting the number of messages to core and rewarding messages should convert better as opposed to bombarding me with something or the other. I still have Grays Anatomy updates ON, because there is a reason.
I hope you’ll post a follow up on how Travel Republic resolve this challenge with Facebook. I wonder if this is a strategy by Facebook to encourage fan page owners to buy ads promoting their page … instead of fan engagement, we are forced into fan re-acquisition?
And from the users point of view… this is a positive step by FB allowing you to ‘Like’ many fan pages, but only hear updates from those that are really important to you. Brands have had FB very easy to date, expect it to get a lot harder in future as you’ll have to really be engaging and provide content of high value on FB pages.
To some degree brands have created this issue themselves by the way some have been running competitions purely as a hook to lure users into liking their page. FB received loads of complaints from users who wanted to enter competitions but not then be bombarded with every piece of content posted on a fan page wall.
FB is a moving target, with a lot of its functionality in its infancy still. I’m told (by FB people) brands should expect frequent changes, don’t bet the family silver on it (it’s a poor strategy to get so worked up about) FB would love it to become an acquisition channel but in reality (I believe) it’s all about engagement.
Perhaps a broader Social Media strategy, which could generate high levels of unique visits and page impressions, without being so dependent upon the whims of the social media giants, would leave you more in control of communications with your fanbase.
Thanks for a great article. Interesting and not entirely unexpected. I agree with Kelly, seems to be more a push in the fan ad direction. I work for http://www.spain-holiday.com we have over 20,000 fans across various languages. So far we haven’t noticed a drop in impressions, but its certainty something to watch out for.
I think the lesson here is to say something worthwhile that engages people. If your message is really interesting then it will be shared regardless of people’s settings.
This will force brands to make good content or be ignored. It makes life harder for those of us who represent brands on Facebook, but it’s better for the user.
I think Twitter should think of a way to turn the volume down too.
Exactly what I was going to say. If you are relevant and fans are visiting your page, you don’t really have to worry. If you’re just white noise, then its going to get tuned out.
It’s not a Facebook conspiracy about selling ads, either, it’s about trying to keep Facebook useable. Now that every brand has a page and every page sends out tons of updates, the like system itself is being devalued.
I personally quite like this, will separate the wheat from the chaff.
Agree with both above points, nothing worse than being spammed in your news feed by sleazy offers. The message to brands is to stay relevant and respectful.
I absolutely agree that from a user perspective you only want to hear updates from those who are important to you. Perhaps Facebook could also facilitate this by making it easier to ‘Unlike’ brands (the option is there, but it’s a bit hidden), whereas at the moment the emphasis is on entrusting their algorithm to make those decisions on your behalf. If their algorithm performs well it may be the best solution, but the potential danger of this change was taking an element of control away from users without them necessarily realising that it was happening. One of the key reasons for their change may have been to stop users getting ‘Facebook fatigue’ from an overload of updates, and thereby save it from any downward spiral that might occur from it becoming over-subscribed (if that word is in their vocabulary!). Another reason may be that ‘Like’ data is part of what Facebook uses to profile you for targeted advertising, so it’s in their interests to make sure that you ‘Like’ as many brands that are indicative of your interests as possible (whether you then follow their updates or not, although that too is valuable data). It also gives them the opportunity to monetise brands’ communication with that audience (and why not, if brands get value out of it) – they introduced ‘Sponsored Stories’ around the same time as this change, that allow brands to guarantee that people see their posts, or their fans’ interactions. There is often talk of how brands can ‘monetise social media’; I’ve no doubt that the one brand that is going to be really great at monetising Facebook is Facebook itself (particularly with an IPO at some point on the horizon). It’s certainly a key channel for engaging with customers, so it will be interesting to see how the options for brand communication develop in future.
Perhaps the challenge is to find more innovative and engaging ways of interacting with customers in environments like Facebook. I don’t follow Travel Republic but I have just looked at their wall posts. The whole image (seen at the top of this page) promises ‘click on the like button for great holiday deals and your chance to win free flights and hotel stays’ but if we are discussing their wall posts (which will have been appearing on the walls of fans), they seem to be more chatty – tell us about your experiences of such and such, or bits of travel news. All well and good, but not necessarily what people signed up for? At that point, you’ll become spam, so perhaps one thing to consider here is that if you promise to communicate one thing, you need to stick with it. That will make you invaluable and people will search out your updates because you are delivering on a promise. If you aren’t delivering what you promised, then people may not make that effort.
Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t having a big image with a “click like above to be in the running for xxx” against Facebook’s terms and conditions anyway? I don’t think I’d be drawing attention to that by contacting Facebook; plenty of stories about profiles and pages being closed for lesser ‘offences’.
I can also already tell TR what FB is going to say. Probably exactly the same thing they told all the folks that built apps and lost several MILLION interactions per month late last year when FB changed how apps were displayed…
For those interested in this topic please take a look at http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2011/02/how-facebook-now-removes-friends-and-pages-from-your-newsfeed-and-how-to-fix-it.html (particularly the comments, a few of which are shown below)
“I have stopped posting since many of my far away friends cant see me anymore anyway. And the zing has left facebook for me”
“What in the world were they thinking? Facebook has just brought its own enormous marketing engine to a grinding halt!”
“Isn’t the original goal and purpose of FaceBook to KEEP us connected?”
“Wow, I was just about to kill my facebook account due to the fact I thought nobody really uses facebook any more. Seriously, what chemicals are the facebook designers on!?”
“Unbelievable. What a backwards way of setting it up! I use my News Feed to keep up with clients and do research on industry trends, etc. All this time, I thought that many weren’t posting. Then I realized that some had been, but they weren’t showing up. Thankfully, your post turned up in my search and now it’s all fixed.”
I, too, am very surprised that Facebook has, seemingly on a grand scale, quietly changed many of its users news feed settings, so that they no longer see posts which they would previously have seen. Most Facebook users have absolutely no knowledge of this, other than a nagging doubt that something is wrong! This is exactly where I was until a couple of days ago when I finally got to the bottom of this.
The solution would appear to be fairly simple. The news feed default should be changed back to show posts from ‘All of your friends and pages’, rather than the much more restrictive ‘Friends and pages you interact with most’ (the exact workings of which are unknown). If users prefer the more limited setting then fine. However, many of these comments portray users feeling very confused by what has taken place and starting to disengage from Facebook as a result. This can’t be good news for anyone.
Hi all,
We’ve just published a rough guide to EdgeRank, the algorithm behind the issues outlined above.
http://www.tnooz.com/2011/04/08/how-to/rough-guide-to-the-content-busting-edgerank-system-on-facebook/
KLM
I have to disagree to some point to the other user comments, that its good for the user. Because, I miss my updates. Outside of brands, let’s think about other type of pages effected, like authors, musicians, small business, community centers, etc. I keep my pages to a minimum and don’t click very like button I see floating around the internet. At the same time, I don’t visit every page I have like, because the type of posts don’t always garner a “like” or comment, but I read them still and like to stay in the loop. I like to see updates from pages I like, and until now, didn’t know why I wasn’t seeing post from most if not all my pages. The type of pages I like don’t offer contest or gimmicks. Some mostly post inspiration messages, some local artist post a quick update to a performance, and other things. I think a better way of satisfying both pages and user profile feeds can be handled.
Just my opinion.
Interesting topic, what exactly is the fan page killer? Do you think that Facebook is making it harder to create a fan page?