16 Dec Facebook Punishes Brand Pages, Instagram Goes Direct, G+ Goes Wild | Social You Should Know
As of 12/1, Brand Pages Suffer Organic Reach Declines As High as 88%
Facebook told us last year that we could expect about 16% of our fans, on average, to see a given post of ours organically. That’s been slipping in recent months as Facebook is tweaking its News Feed quite often. But the adjustment that took place at the beginning of this month led to drops in organic reach on brand Pages as high as 88%. In the 21 Pages we ran through our analysis, the average decline was 44% compared to November. Of course, with fewer users seeing the content, the raw number of engaged users plunged, on average, about 35%. Reach is now closer to 2.5% than 16%. Most frustrating is that we saw no correlation between Page performance in November and the “punishment” in December, so having an active, engaged Page didn’t appear to help. This (hopefully accidental) change fundamentally changes the value proposition of Facebook for brands. I’m still somewhat hopeful that Facebook will roll this back. If you’re seeing the same thing, talk to your Facebook rep.
Instagram Direct, A Challenge to Snapchat and Boon to Community Managers?
Instagram late this week rolled out Instagram Direct, a new messaging functionality that allows individuals to send pictures and videos directly to their friends instead of only on the public feed. It’s also a potential boon to community managers, who will be able to contact those they follow like they can on Snapchat, without the 10-second message deletion.
Google+ Gets into Sponsored Posts In A Clever Way
Unlike Instagram or Facebook, you can’t currently pay to have your content promoted in the stream on Google+. But Google came up with a clever way to promote G+ content anywhere on the web. Called “+Post Ads,” your G+ posts can now run on the Google Display Network of 2 million sites. Brands will only pay when someone hovers over the ad unit to activate it. Google claims that ads gets 50% higher “expansion rates” because of their social annotations. Very clever.
