problems with facebook as a way to reach users

[Jiri Eischmann]

Joe Brockmeier píše v Čt 10. 04. 2014 v 11:58 -0500:
> 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.

The Fedora Page is doing pretty well in terms of number of users because
we got all those likes before the change we're talking about. As I wrote
in one of my previous post, we got 15,000 likes in one year. After the
change we've gotten ~350 in the last 6 months. That's not something I
would call "doing well". 

> 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.

As Matthew already wrote you confuse click-throughs with views. 7% of
views/number of users is IMHO pretty bad. Especially in the case of a
social network page which users like/+1/... because they want to follow
its news.

> 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'.

I'm not saying we're doing bad compared to other FB pages, I'm saying
that Facebook has become a very ineffective communication channel
compared to other social networks. Saying that other pages are doing
even worse kinda makes my point. 

> > 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 maintain 5 other FB pages from a page of a beer event to a page of a
small town news server with different share/like per number of users
ratios and it's similar everywhere - a huge drop of engagement. And
Facebook announced they would let even fewer unpaid posts to users in
the future.
Moreover I don't find very wise to share whatever the Fedora page
publishes to make the engagement higher. 250 out of my 314 FB friends
don't care about operating systems or Fedora and if I share posts they
don't care about at all I will disappear from their news feed as well.
That's the core of the doom of Facebook. You no longer decide what you
want to see, they do, based on lousy algorithms. In the past, you had to
"hide" your friend in the news feed if you didn't want to get messages
from them, now you just need not to actively share/like/comment their
posts and Facebook hides them for you. But as the video says you often
just passively read the post and still appreciate it.

> > 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