Posted on 04/20/2017 7:03:38 AM PDT by Red Badger
The Facebook anguish continues. A Medium post investigating declining Facebook reach has set off the most recent alarm bells among publishers. Kurt Gessler, deputy editor for digital news at the Chicago Tribune, posted that since January, the Tribune has seen a significant drop in the reach of its posts on Facebook, despite having grown its fan base.
The post sparked a sigh of validation across publishers as others chimed in on social media that they’re seeing similar declines.
@kurtgessler This looks somewhat familiar to me as well. It's not just you.
— rob blatt (@robblatt) April 19, 2017
@whet @kurtgessler This is great @kurtgessler – I haven’t crunched the #s yet but our FB reach is definitely down. And we do have FBIA enabled.
— Bettina Chang (@bechang8) April 18, 2017
Facebook’s news feed algorithm changes have been part of publishing reality for many years. But to Matt Karolian, director of audience engagement at The Boston Globe, “last month was probably the worst we’ve had in reach in about a year. The fact everyone else is seeing it is a little bit troubling.”
Aysha Khan said Facebook reach has also been sliding at the Religion News Service, where she’s social media editor.
“Reach spiked in the summer, and we started hitting 15, 25K reach on bigger posts that were polarizing,” Khan said. “It wasn’t just political posts, but any kind of interviews. Anything that had potential to get a big reaction got a big reaction. But then we noticed that kind of stopped, and by January, it was just gone. Now we’re worse off than we were to start with.”
The change has happened even as RNS has been doing more video, including live video, and photos, things that Facebook has encouraged. Khan said RNS is still trying, though, with plans for more regularly scheduled live video and videos generally.
There are so many factors that go into how much reach a post gets, from the frequency of said posts to the subject matter to the levers Facebook is pushing, so theories about the declines abounded. One was that the decline was local to Chicago. Other publishers in other markets reported the same trend, though.
Brandon Doyle, CEO and founder of Wallaroo Media, a social media consulting firm, said he’s seen declining organic reach in the first quarter across about 20 publishers he tracks. He speculated that Facebook is suppressing publishers’ organic reach so publishers will spend more with Facebook to promote their posts. Facebook also could be in the middle of another algorithm tweak that it’s yet to announce publicly, he said.
Other popular theories were that Facebook’s preference for video over text posts and for publishers that are using its Instant Articles format over regular links is disadvantaging some. Facebook hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
Others wondered if reach is declining for some because people are getting tired of reading about politics (“I know people who have literally unliked all the news sources they used to follow pretty religiously — maybe Facebook is responding to that,” Khan said) or Trump is raising the bar for news.
@tylrfishr @kainazamaria @kurtgessler My guess on this: everything is spikier in Trumpworld. A broad pub is having more things squelched to focus on "hotter" stuff
— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) April 18, 2017
Lifestyle sites offered some evidence of these theories. LittleThings has been pushing hard into video, and March was its second-highest traffic month of all time, which reflects continued strong Facebook referral traffic, said Joe Speiser, co-founder of LittleThings. (LittleThings also attributes some of its success to A/B testing on Facebook, a step he says many don’t do.) “Facebook’s made very clear video is a priority,” he said. “You can go through the feed yourself. Video is everywhere.”
Thrillist chief creative officer Ben Robinson said he thinks that Thrillist’s recent emphasis on video has helped lead to an all-time high in Facebook referrals, along with the adoption of Instant Articles. While a lack of political coverage hurt the site during the run-up to the election, he said it may be seeing the flip side of that now.
In a follow-up email, Gessler said he’s working with Facebook to try to figure out what’s going on, but that he didn’t think the decline was related to politics news burnout or the Cubs’ World Series win and post-series lull. The shift seems too big to just chalk up to stories’ subject matter, he said.
“Maybe it’s a little of everything,” he concluded in his post.
Whatever the reasons, the post brought a fresh round of soul-searching and hand-wringing over the hold Facebook has over publishers’ audience. “There’s a large segment of the population that gets most of its news from Facebook,” Karolian said. “If there’s been an overall decline in high-quality news that’s circulating on the platform, that is generally concerning from a philosophical standpoint.”
If it’s true that Facebook’s preference for video is a factor, few publishers are equipped make the switch to video, nor is it clear that they should try to make a hard shift to a medium they’re inexperienced in and which most publishers can’t monetize on Facebook anyway. And just doing more video perpetuates publishers’ dependence on Facebook, which can change its algorithm again at any time, as it’s done many times in the past.
To some, the issue points to the need for publishers to diversify their audience sources through search, direct traffic and newsletters, while others registered resignation.
“In my mind, we’re kind of at the mercy of the algorithm,” Khan said. “But there’s a lot of stories that are getting underwhelming responses that readers can’t even see. It is this constant thing, trying to figure out how to incorporate it into your workflow. At one point they were pushing images, and then they were pushing video, and live video. I don’t think it’ll ever stop.”
Just as an aside. The FB concept goes way back to before President Lincoln’s time. There was a broadsheet that did basically the same thing.
I read where most kids go to Twitter and texting now.
never open an ad either, I do find so many annoying so I find my viewing of facebook posts has declined significantly, it’s not what I want to spend time doing.
Some of my relatives live on FB all day.......................and most of the night...................
Impressions are the number of times a post from your Page is displayed. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, if someone sees a Page update in News Feed and then sees that same update when a friend shares it that would count as 2 impressions.Reach is the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. Reach might be less than impressions since one person can see multiple impressions. For example, if a person sees a Page update in News Feed and then sees that same update when a friend shares it that would represent a reach count of one.
That’s my use of FB too...and working with “friends” in the background to try and fight PROGS
...the comments I am interested in “scroll away” so far and fast that you simply often cannot even find a comment topic you have interacted with.
I’m sort of torn.
Make no mistake, Facebook is run by flaming Lefties who DESPISE free-speech, but unknowingly THEY along with Twitter helped elect Trump because people were able to circumvent traditional media and get the truth out there.
Facebook has a free side and a pay side... it is free to post your company article on Facebook. The reach is how many people see that article. Facebook is severely limiting how many people see your articles for for free to try and charge companies money by “boosting their posts”. is showing it to more people.
everyone on Facebook is the product that is being sold to advertisers and not being compensated in any way except you have a cool place to brag about your vacation and catch up with friends.
Thanks, my Friend.
As usual your ability to cleary summarize a complex subject/area is excellent!
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Cboldt
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Thanks, my Friend.
As usual your ability to cleary summarize a complex subject/area is excellent!
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Don’t bother with fake news about Trump on MMS. FR has Trump’s Tweets and his real news each day!It
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In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Publishers are seeing another big decline in reach on Facebook, Cboldt wrote:
Impressions are the number of times a post from your Page is displayed. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, if someone sees a Page update in News Feed and then sees that same update when a friend shares it that would count as 2 impressions.
Reach is the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. Reach might be less than impressions since one person can see multiple impressions. For example, if a person sees a Page update in News Feed and then sees that same update when a friend shares it that would represent a reach count of one.
Credit facebook for the quality of the definitions, I just did a copy and paste ;-)
1. Some sites require registration
2. Some sites expect you to click on 10+ links to read the entire article; i.e., a picture and a caption on every page
3. Most sites have an inordinate number of popups that interfere with reading the article
4. "You won't believe what happened next" click bait that is almost always a let-down
5. I already know everything I need to know from reading it on Free Republic! :-)
How come there are only 4,568 “Likes” on the Matt Drudge Facebook page? out of millions of readers?
Interesting. Thanks for info.
At least, you knew where to go for the data/info!
Thanks again.
Everyone on Facebook is the product that is being sold to advertisers and not being compensated in any way except you have a cool place to brag about your vacation and catch up with friends.
Exactly. Same with me. And if not reversed, this WILL kill Facebook.
Same. I hate facebook. Watching it go down will be glorious.
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