Put aside the ROI of advertising on it and questions over how to perfect a social media strategy, Facebook at one billion users is an absolute beast of a platform when it comes to the numbers.
Sometimes it is worth just pondering for a moment how large the site has become and what it is actually doing with all the interact and content that flows through it every second of the day.
The volume of data is, in short, eye-watering.
And if travel is such a natural fit – at least in terms of it being perhaps one of the most relevant subject areas in a user’s life for sharing and talking about on a social network – then the numbers collected here by digital agency Betapond are (again) a good reason to pause for thought.
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About Kevin May
Pity that Facebook is desperately trying to push up their revenue by recently tweaking the page post visibility algorithm. We have seen a drop in our unpaid post visibility of around 60%. Then today I get an email from Facebook preaching the value of paid posts.
If they continue to use bully tactics like this I feel businesses will slowly start looking to other platforms such as Google +. (Just my two cents)
Hi Michael, this is a common complaint I’m hearing a lot these days – one thing I would say is that “good content will always rise to the surface, and great content will find a way to go viral”. If you adhere to this principle, Facebook still offers the best platform for getting your message out there.
The fact remains, it’s users and fans who will decide what is good or great content not brands,
Cheers
Justin
Sorry Justin, that answer has to be just too simplistic. Good content cannot possibly always rise to the surface on every occasion simply because other equally good content is keeping it from the top. It’s like the old “We Can Gaurantee You Front Page on Google” claims of SEO Gurus. Niche marketing will obviously help and targetting those who wish to find you will clearly ensure better results but there’s still a numbers game being played by Facebook business users which makes no sense. “Thanks folks we’ve nearly got 1000 followers now…” etc etc. And it can’t perpetually just be about content surely. It must be at some point about business coversion and ROI. The numbers are phemononal from a social point of view for sure but you need to back up your very general claim that Facebook offers the best platform for getting your message out there. Does it? Really? And I still have concerns of the change of use of the word “brand” to encompass any business name out there. To use the phrase “brand” to cover all products and services – particularly in hospitlaity is simplistic at best and does not even touch on the intricacies of the buying motivations of destinations. You need to tell us all where these “brand” messages are really making a difference. I don’t see the examples jumping out at me in the context of Scottish Tourism anyway?
Sorry but I totally disagree with your statement that good content will rise to the top on the Facebook platform and it is indeed Facebook who is determining what is classified as ‘good content’ not the users.
We have seen fluctuations previously based on the quality of the content that we posted but not to the degree that this recent change has made. Our average post was being viewed by 10,000 – 12,000 people yet in the last few days since the change we are yet to reach more than 4,000.
It is already documented that Facebook is pushing pages towards paid posts http://marketingland.com/facebook-continues-to-tighten-organic-page-post-reach-23233.
I see a lot of similarities with Google’s monopoly of search advertising and now Google seems to be well and truly throwing their hat into the travel contender’s ring. Will Facebook follow suit….time will tell.
Hi Michael, – not disagreeing that the recent changes have hit pages hard in terms of their organic reach, but my point about “Good Content” remains strong, IF it really is good, ok, great content. Simple fact remains that people go to Facebook on a more regular basis than any other social or news platform. IF your content is here, and IF you have engaged with your fan base on an ongoing basis and IF the content has struck accord with them over a prolonged period of time, THEN good content will continue to rise to the top. Real fans will seek out your content on your page, and come to you.
The change may have affected pages significantly in the last few weeks but change is still good. If we look at the simple numbers its inevitable that reach will proportionately decrease:
2011: Your Page has 10,000 fans who each have 130 friends and like 30 different pages.
2012: Your Page has 12,000 fans who each have 230 friends and now like 45 different pages.
All the content all the time can’t reach all the fans otherwise FB becomes the biggest spam-fest on the internet. I think Ian’s point up above really hits the nail on the head, for ongoing engagement and the widest views of your content on a regular basis niche targeting is the way to go. Those pages / brands that focused on prize giveaways and bidding wars to simply drive up fan numbers for fan numbers’ sake are probably the ones that are now seeing the biggest differential between fan numbers and post views.
Interesting time ahead for sure, healthy debate welcomed.
Hi Ian,
I don’t disagree with you, my point was greatly trimmed down for reasons of brevity.
Wrong time to hit enter there…..was going to add:
Good content needs to be focused over a sustained period of time and drive prolonged interaction & engagement. A single piece of content that generates a lot of views via shares / comments / Likes / retweets etc is all well and good but not an end in itself. Prolonged interaction with a destination / attraction will boost that Page’s FB Edge Rank which in turn will ensure its content is viewed by a greater percentage of it’s fans without necessarily the need to pay extra for it.
The problem comes when destinations / attractions don’t take the lead from their fans in terms of what they want to see. How many times have we seen the “posting links to a web site” approach that doesn’t take off in the engagement stakes -suddenly and probably accidentally interrupted by a truly engaging piece of content (be it a flippant comment or a terrific image) – then instead of the destination learning from this and adapting they go straight back to their old ways of “posting links”, then blaming the platform because they aren’t seeing interaction. To me this is FB doing their job for their users, give them what they interact with. If destination content isn’t connecting with their fans then its time to look at the content maybe or alternatively pay for people to see it, like any other form of advertising.
Once engagement levels have built up and trust earned how about introducing a FB offer? Then measuring how this stacks up against other digital offers / campaigns in terms of redemption. But the engagement must come before the “sell”, only after trust is built up can ROI be truly measured. I could point to a destination that saw 29% bigger shopping baskets and 58% greater propensity to purchase from their Facebook fans than from any other digital channel but it might look like a blatant plug. Happy to go into more detail off line though.
Cheers
Justin