04 Mar Facebook Brand Page Reach Improves Slightly in January; Still Down 30% Since November
Our December 10, 2013 post, Facebook Brand Pages Suffer 44% Decline in Reach Since December 1 was discussed a lot in social circles, generating over 4,500 likes and nearly 2,000 Tweets alone as of this writing.
We acknowledged at the time that the study was good because it used data from 21 different pages, but it was not good because we had only 9 days of data in December. Some also pointed out that December is a strange month for brands on Facebook because of the increase in marketing (paid and organic) that happens around the holidays. Fair point.
So we went back and looked again, this time using data from all of November, comparing it first with all of December, and then comparing it again with the full month of January, on the same 21 brand pages we used the first time.
Organic Reach Declines 30% in January Compared to November
The good news? January wasn’t as bad as December.
The bad news? January was still pretty bad for organic reach, with brands seeing an average decline of 30% when compared to November.
Facebook Reach Jan 2014 down 30% from November
Rise in Number of Engaged Users
There is some good news for brands. As Facebook shows your content to fewer people, some brand pages are seeing solid growth in their total number of engaged users. Two brands in our data set saw increases north of 100% in fact, and the average was 19%, although some pages did see a decline as high as 62%.
This wasn’t the case in December, where the average page in our data set saw a 20% decline in engaged users. It will be interesting to see if the January ranges continue in future months.
Facebook engaged users grew 30%
This suggests that Facebook is having some success showing branded content to those most likely to engage in it.
What are you seeing? Is your reach still down? How is engagement doing on your pages?
