Articles to help you
navigate the music business.
Giovanni
Gallucci is a self-described "recovering dot.net
programmer turned photographer, filmmaker, and
online content creator” who shares his social
media thinking in this new series. “Gio” has
worked with TV’s Troubadour TX, Topo
Chico waters, 41 Entertainment, AMP management,
Hilton Hotels, be Music & Entertainment, and
NASCAR among others.
Giovanni Gallucci was a hit at the “I Made a
Record...Now What?”
music seminar sponsored by
the Texas Music Chart.
What Is the Facebook Algorithm Doing to Our News
Feeds?
By
Giovanni Gallucci
Late
last year Facebook page managers started
reporting dramatic drops in reach for posts on
their Facebook pages. The amount of the drop
differed depending on who you spoke with. I had
some clients who saw large drops in organic
reach while others saw small drops. I didn't
have any clients whose reach flat lined or grew
during the last quarter of the year. The trend
in my experience began early last year and
spiked in September 2013.
During
this period Facebook had been somewhat cagey
about these reports. In most cases they claimed
they were tweaking their news algorithm to weed
out low quality content - whatever they
determined that to be. Additionally, they would
follow up these statements claiming that the
average reach of posts hadn't changed.
I
challenged one Facebook representative on a
panel at SxSW about the effects the algorithm
changes were having on my client accounts. We
had spent a considerable amount of time building
up a fan base of over 120,000 people to see our
average organic reach drop from 7% to below 3%
per post. I asked the panelist if the social
network was making changes to force marketers to
use the Facebook ad platform. He bristled at the
suggestion that they were actively engineering
the algorithm in order to compel users to spend
money on ads to fill the gap in lost organic
reach.
On
December 5, 2013, AdAge confirmed
marketers’ suspicions in regard to the loss in
organic reach. In a leaked sales presentation,
Facebook stated: "We expect organic distribution
of an individual page's posts to gradually
decline over time as we continually work to make
sure people have a meaningful experience on the
site.”
On its
own, this seemed a plausible explanation which
wasn't too far off their public statements on
the matter. However, there was more info in the
leaked document. In the accompanying slide deck,
Facebook made the case that marketers should
consider paid distribution "to maximize delivery
of your message in the news feed” as an
alternative to relying on organic reach.
Additionally, Facebook had a section in the
document where they suggest that Facebook page
managers should rethink how they view fan
acquisition on the platform. In their minds,
Facebook should no longer be considered
primarily as a channel to acquire fans to build
an organic distribution channel for content, but
“as a tool for making paid advertising more
effective” and as a way to “improve advertising
effectiveness.”
So
there you have it, straight from the horse’s
mouth. Many of you have spent years building a
fan base on Facebook, and now they’ve changed
the rules in the middle of the game in order to
make you pay to get access to your hard-earned
fans.
What
do you do about it? I’ll cover that next week.
More:
The 10
“Commandments”
4 Tips for
Getting Fans to Your Shows with Social Media
