Dive Brief:
- Publishers' organic reach per post on Facebook has dropped 52% from January 2016 through mid-July 2016, according to research from SocialFlow and as reported by Marketing Land.
- The data comes from the roughly 300 publishers that use SocialFlow for their Facebook Pages.
- As Marketing Land points out, the 52% drop is 10 percentage points more than the 42% drop between January 2016 and May 2016 that SocialFlow previously reported. Facebook changed its news feed algorithm in late June.
Dive Insight:
Publishers' organic reach has been declining since before Facebook changed its algorithm, but the latest numbers from SocialFlow show how the freefall has continued from May to mid-July. The data comes shortly after Facebook changed its algorithm to emphasize posts from users' friends and family, including photos, videos, status updates and links — a move that inherently de-emphasized posts from publishers and brands.
“An increasing amount of content and a finite amount of consumer attention, arithmetically there’s no other possible outcome than each individual post on average is going to get less reach,” SocialFlow CEO Jim Anderson told Marketing Land.
It's unclear whether the numbers will drop further from here. SocialFlow's analysis only took into account about half-of-a-month's worth of data after Facebook made its algorithm change, meaning there's potentially more bad news to come for publishers on Facebook. The findings come as Facebook has moved increasingly from an organic social platform for brands and publishers to one that has largely become pay-to-play.
One beneficiary of Facebook's new algorithm is video content. Facebook hasn’t been shy in saying how much video is favored in the latest iteration of its algorithm, and SocialFlow's data backs that up.
“Video is the type of post that performs best by far," Anderson said. "Video comprised about 1% of posts in the data we analyzed; we take about 1.5 million posts over the course of the month. But those posts generated eight times the reach and twelve times the shares when compared to other types of posts.”