problems with facebook as a way to reach users

[Joe Brockmeier]

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On 04/10/2014 09:54 AM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
> Matthew Miller píše v Čt 10. 04. 2014 v 10:11 -0400:
>> This is probably old hat to some of the social media experts
>> here, but I found it enlightening, especially in light of recent
>> comments about our presence there.
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g>
>> 
>> It certainly mirrors my experience with the Facebook group --
>> lots of members, but very low engagement.

Just FYI we have three points of presence on FB (at least):

The Facebook *Group*: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Fedora.linux/
The Facebook Fedora Community Folks *group*:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/127560783969535/
And the Fedora Linux *Page*: https://www.facebook.com/TheFedoraProject

This is, IMHO, confusing - so let's be sure we're talking about the
same things.

The Fedora Page is doing pretty well. We have 40K+ people who've
'liked' the page.

We're consistently getting around 2K to 3.5K "people saw this post" on
Facebook. And, as I mentioned in an earlier discussion, we're not
doing very well at actually re-sharing things effectively from the
Fedora Page to actually make it *more* effective.

> The video nails the situation very well. Our communication channel
> on Facebook is completely dead.

No, it's actually not - I just think your expectations are out of
whack, here.

Advertisers are usually happy with a click-through or engagement rate
that's much lower than about 7% of the audience. IIRC from my
publishing days, a 2% CTR is extremely good - so getting a post in
front of 7% of the audience at any given time is actually good.

Let's also not assume that we can't reach the 40K people who follow
the page via other means. You can't rely on any one channel to reach
all the users - which is why we need the magazine, Twitter, G+, FB,
*and* mailing lists.

> 
The heartbleed
> issue, which is a very important announcement, only reached 2,000
> people out of 40,000 user base.

The Heartbeat post reached about 2,100 people out of 40K, which is 5%
of the audience. That's not bad. I manage other pages with >170K
"likes" and they get 5K to 7K 'saw this post'.

> Yes, we can fight it by making the engagement higher manually (by 
> sharing the news), it's not going to help much and the trend is 
> negative.

Citation needed. You've done this? You have stats to show that it
doesn't work?

> I think we will have to follow a similar path in the end and focus
> on communication channels where we can actually get some reasonable
> level of engagement. Not mentioning that G+ and Twitter are
> generally more popular among our target audience from my
> experience.

What do you consider "a reasonable level of engagement," where are you
getting that number from, and what's the evidence that Twitter or G+
will result in more engagement?

We have slightly fewer followers on Twitter, but we don't have any way
to know how many people see our tweets. The Heartbleed update I
tweeted on 8 April has 61 retweets. That's good on shares, but the
nature of Twitter is much more ephemeral - the half-life of a tweet is
much shorter than a FB post.

Note - I'm not against focusing on G+ and Twitter, but our Facebook
presence is not "dead" in the slightest.

Best,

jzb
- -- 
Joe Brockmeier | Principal Cloud & Storage Analyst
jzb at redhat.com | http://community.redhat.com/
Twitter: @jzb  | http://dissociatedpress.net/
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