I’ve removed you from Facebook
Nope.. Our page is still there. You had me worried for a minute 🙂
In the interests of transparency here’s why we post 180 posts a week on FB…
Last month we reached 8 million Facebook timelines. The website reached 1.4 million people.
If we post a story on our website front page and do nothing more then it will get reads in the hundreds. If we then post a link post to that story on Facebook it will get thousands.
The truth of publishing is now that without using Facebook to promote our content we wouldn’t have enough readers to view the ads to pay for the site (And by pay for the site I mean contribute to the wages of 12 full time members of staff).
Now, we post links to old stories too. These are stories that are, in new age publisher speak referred to as, evergreen content.
evergreen content is content that is still relevant or interesting despite it being published at an earlier date. A news item on an event report is not such content. A story about riding in Iceland probably is.
Now, you can see from our story read counts on the front page that each story gets read in the thousands. However, last month we reached 8 million people on Facebook with our posts and 1.4 million people on this site. Clearly not everyone reads the stories we publish. There is, in short, a huge audience who have never read any particular story we publish. Together with the fact that much of what we publish is evergreen that means we have a tremendous resource at our disposal in the form of content that most people have not yet seen.
When they do see it they also see the ads. They may also decide to return to us again and some may decide to ultimately subscribe directly.
“But what about those of us who have seen the stories you keep reposting on Facebook?”, I hear you cry.
Well, that’s where Facebook’s rather clever algorithm comes into play.
Facebook does a very good job of ensuring that ‘most’ of it’s users don’t see the same post more than once. If one of our posts pops up in your feed and you skip on by without clicking then FB will consider that you are not interested and it will do what it can to prevent you from seeing that same post again.
If you do click it then it will also try and make sure you don’t see it again but this time it will also consider that you are clearly interested in what we have to say and it will probably show you more posts from us.
If you skip past them all it will alter it’s assessment of your interest in us and reduce future exposure to our posts.
In this way we can keep having a go at exposing our existing evergreen content to users of Facebook who have not yet seen it. It’s in Facebook’s interest to avoid repetition as that will lead to you not having a good experience on their platform and you may decide to use it less.
But it’s not perfect. yet.
If you are a regular reader of our front page and also of Facebook then there is a high likelihood that you will see a post in your fed relating to a story that you have already read. IN that case you could click the arrow at the top right of the post and choose the ‘see less from this page’ option. You are thn proactively helping the algorithm learn what you like and want to see.
We only want people to be exposed to our content who are interested or potentially interested in it. Facebook does a rather good job of moderating all of that. But it sometimes gets it wrong and you my feel you are getting too much.
The reality is that Facebook itself is rapidly becoming the no.1 platform for most media publishers. It is where we reach the largest audience.
This site may be where all our content is published but there is no doubt that the majority of consumption of that content is driven by Facebook.
So, apologies if you think there’s too much hitting your timeline, but hopefully you can now see why that is the case. For any sources of content in your feed that you want to see less or more of, there’s that link in the top right hand corner of the post that lets you adjust the way Facebook sees you.
We also earn money FROM Facebook now. If you view one of our posts on a mobile via the Facebook app then you will have seen the page loads practically instantly and rather than have to wait for your browser to load our web page you get the whole story right there on your screen served up by Facebook. That’s an Instant Article and we get to put ads in there that are sourced by Facebook. We earn money from that.
So not only does Facebook have a huge amount of control over the traffic to our own website but they also have control over ad revenues that we can earn on their platform.
🙂
