More Is Less: Facebook Fan Engagement (Part 3)
This is the THIRD in a series of blog posts that examines the effect of recent changes to Facebook on my (and others’) Facebook fan pages.
The first was 5 Real Estate Ways The New FB Timeline #FAILS My Page & My Fans.
The second was: More is Less: The Truth About Facebook Fan Engagement After Timeline (Part 1). There was no Part 2; if Facebook can be random and fucked up, then I can be too LOL!
This one (Part 3), comprises three screen shots of the same post of a quote by Mae West posted on three separate pages She Quotes, Amazing Women Rock, and Crazy Bicth Society in the last 24 hours, and clearly demonstrates that not all pages are created equal in the way in which Facebook delivers posts to page fans.
The image was first posted on She Quotes and subsequently shared on the other two pages.
I believe the number of shares recorded on the She Quotes post (306) is the cumulative total of all the shares generated by all three pages.
That means She Quotes, Amazing Women Rock, and Crazy Bitch Society each generated 213, 12, and 79 shares respectively, and 115, 41, 183 post likes respectively.
The curious part is that, at the time these screen shots were taken, the same three pages had 7,339, 32,695, and 36,500 fans (likes) respectively.
That means that Amazing Women Rock, with more than four times more fans (400%) than She Quotes, generated about one twentieth (6%) the number of shares. Hmmmmm.
It’s true that each of the fan base of each of the three pages differs, and that there is overlap between the audiences.
However, as the creator and administrator of both She Quotes and Amazing Women Rock, I know that their audiences are not sufficiently unalike to account for the huge disparity in the number of likes and shares generated by the same post.
It’s also true that Amazing Women Rock is an older page than both She Quotes and Crazy Bitch Society, and that a good proportion of its fan base may be dead wood. But that STILL doesn’t explain the disparity.
Overall, the engagement on Amazing Women Rock continues to be dismal since the implementation of the new timeline, despite the fact that fan base continues to grow, albeit much more slowly than it has in the past. Sadly, it now seems to be caught in a downward spiral (relatively speaking) as less engagement results in fewer potential new fans being exposed to the page.
I believe the drop in engagement is due to the way posts are fed, or more to the point NOT fed to the page’s fan base. (The design is more of a pain in the ass for administrators than it is a barrier to fan engagement as only a small percentage of fans actually visit pages they have liked.)
The saga continues. Meanwhile, I have opened a Pinterest account and am putting more effort into other strategies to drive traffic to this website.
Click to see large versions of the screen shots:
{gallery}mae_west_fb{/gallery}
