In Did Facebook Decrease Pages’ Reach?, the Edgerank Checker blog shared that since “Facebook announced a drastic change to the EdgeRank algorithm on September 20th, we’ve heard widespread complaints that Page Admins are experiencing a decrease in Reach.”
Edgerank quoted their source as a blog written by Ogilvy and linked to their article Facebook Algorithim to Decrease Reach on Brand Page Posts.
(Check out our response to the Facebook Page reach decrease by clicking here.)
What Did We Find?
The typical Facebook Page in our data set was experiencing 26% Organic Reach the week before the 20th. The week after the 20th, these same Pages were experiencing 19.5%. These Pages lost approximately 6.5% of their Reach after the 20th.
Other Page Admins suggested that they have received detrimental losses to their Viral Reach. When examining Viral Reach Per Post Per Fan, we found that before the 20th Pages were experiencing 0.69%. After the 20th, Pages suffered a drop to 0.38%. This resulted in a nearly -45% change for Pages’ Viral Reach. Over the long term, this could have serious negative impact on Pages’ ability to enter Fan’s Friends’ news feeds.
We looked at a few other metrics to provide a bit of perspective. These same pages were experiencing 0.59% Engagement/Fan before the 20th. After the 20th, these Pages’ Engagement/Fan decreased to 0.49%. However, it’s difficult to determine if this loss in Engagement was related to the decrease in Reach.
We also looked at Virality over these same time periods. Before the 20th, pages were seeing 1.91% Virality, and after the 20th, they were seeing 2.04% Virality. As Facebook defines Virality, it implies how your content is able to engage your audience. This change in Virality, which resulted in a slight improvement, seems to imply the content was similar in terms of engaging the people who saw it.
What Does This Mean?
Overall we found that Organic Reach (-25% change), Viral Reach (-45%), and Engagement/Fan decreased (-17%), while Virality marginally increased (+7%). With both Organic and Viral Reach dropping fairly drastically, it seems to indicate that visibility was possibly reduced within the news feed. This decrease in Reach may have also caused the decrease in Engagement/Fan averages. Virality was relatively maintained, which seems to suggest the quality of the content was roughly the same (or was able to engage people who saw it).It should be noted, that this is a fairly small sample size and should be monitored further. We’ll be monitoring these changes moving forward.