SPC has an active Facebook page, which is administrated by about 10 SPC folks. (So when “St Paul’s Cathedral” posts something, it could be anyone from Susan F. to Chris H. to Dean Penny.) You don’t have to be a member of Facebook to visit the page, which has news items, links, and photos.
Only, not so much. Facebook increasingly limits what it calls “the organic reach” of pages like ours. That means it may not show the page on the walls of everyone who has signed up to follow. Indeed, it may only reach 1-2% of the people who think they are following it. This is because they want to encourage us to buy more exposure.
But supposedly Facebook WILL show it to more people, if the people who have seen it, interact with it fairly quickly. So if you like, or comment, or share, FB thinks that the content is more valuable, and will then increase the numbers of people to whom it serves the page.
So, I did an experiment. On Friday morning I posted two different things on the SPC facebook wall, about 30 minutes apart. I let the first one, the control, attract whatever “likes” it would naturally. But on the second one, the experimental, I asked people to like it, to see if we could expand the reach. And then I monitored how many people liked it, and how many were served the page.
The control picture by Saturday morning had accumulated 12 likes, and had been served to 80 people.That means Facebook showed it to 80 of you.
But the experimental accumulated 78 “likes”, 8 comments, and was served to 435 people.
So it works!
You can see the data in the graph below, where green is the experimental and red is control; the solid lines are the number of people that were served the page, and the dotted lines are the likes.
Take home message: the more you “like” something that is posted,and the more you interact with it, the more it will be seen by others.
–Susan Forsburg, blogmaster
