The Facebook fan is one of the most-cited brand-marketing metrics of the past three years. Brands have built fan-acquisition campaigns, run paid promotion to drive page Likes, and reported quarterly fan-count growth in marketing reviews and board decks. The number gets the credit. The question is whether the number is actually doing the work.
This is the working read on Facebook fans as a brand metric — what they actually measure, what the recent algorithm changes mean for organic reach, and how thoughtful brand marketers should be using the metric heading into 2014.
What a Facebook fan actually is
A Facebook fan is a user who has clicked the Like button on a brand's page. Once they have, the brand's posts become eligible to appear in their News Feed. Eligible — not guaranteed. Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm and its successors decide which of the posts a fan sees, and the share of fans who actually see any given post has been declining steadily.
The most recent data from major analytics firms and direct Facebook disclosures put average organic reach on a brand page at somewhere in the 12 to 16 percent range as of late 2013. That number was over 25 percent a year ago. It will almost certainly be lower by the middle of 2014.
The implication is straightforward. A fan acquired today does not see what they would have seen 18 months ago. The metric that brand teams have been optimizing for is depreciating in real time.
The recent algorithm changes
Facebook's December 2013 News Feed update — the company's framing was "high-quality content" prioritization — has accelerated the organic reach decline that brands have been watching for the past year. Posts from friends and family are being weighted higher. Posts from publisher pages and brand pages are being weighted relative to demonstrated user interest in that page's prior content.
The practical effect: brand pages that produce content the audience genuinely engages with continue to get reach. Brand pages that produce promotional content with low engagement rates get throttled.
The pattern is not new but the December cycle made it visible. Brand marketers who were optimizing fan counts now need to also be optimizing engagement-per-post, content quality, and post timing.
What fans are still good for
The metric is depreciating, not dead.
Audience addressability. Even at lower organic reach, fans are a real audience the brand can reach without paying for media at full retail. Boosted posts and Promoted Posts cost less to reach existing fans than to acquire new audiences from scratch.
Brand-association signal. A high fan count remains a credibility signal to first-time visitors. A brand page with 50,000 fans reads as more legitimate than a brand page with 800. The signal is softer than it was two years ago but it is still real.
Cross-channel pickup. Press coverage, advertising, and brand-comms work that references a brand's social presence still cites fan counts as a quick credibility number.
Promotion eligibility. Facebook's ad targeting tools let brands run campaigns specifically against their existing fans, lookalikes of their fans, or fans plus extensions. The fan list is the seed.
What fans are not good for
Several uses of the fan metric that brand marketers should think hard about.
Pure fan-count growth campaigns. Paying Facebook to acquire fans, with no plan for engaging them or converting them into customers, is increasingly money spent on a depreciating asset. The brands running these campaigns should consider what the spend is actually buying.
Comparing fan counts across brands. Some categories have structurally larger fan counts because the audience naturally Likes brand pages in those categories — fashion, consumer electronics, food and beverage. Other categories have structurally smaller counts because the audience does not — B2B, financial services, industrial. Comparing fan counts across categories without adjusting for the base rate produces misleading conclusions.
Treating fans as customers. A fan is not a customer. Sometimes there is significant overlap. Sometimes there is almost none. Brands that conflate the two miss what their actual customer base is doing.
Equating fan count with engagement. Two brand pages with the same fan count can have completely different engagement profiles. The active page may be producing meaningful brand work. The dormant page is mostly a number on a marketing review.
What thoughtful brand marketers are doing instead
Five operating practices stand out across the brand programs that are doing this well heading into 2014.
One. Measuring engagement rate, not just fans. Engagement per post divided by fan count gives a meaningful read on whether the audience is actually interacting with the brand. Brands that track this number weekly catch problems earlier.
Two. Investing in content quality. Strong photos. Useful information. Posts that earn organic shares. The platforms reward content that the audience actually wants and punishes content that they don't.
Three. Diversifying social presence. Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. Brand programs that have only built on Facebook are exposed to Facebook's product and algorithm decisions. Brands operating across multiple platforms are not.
Four. Building owned audiences. Email lists. Brand-owned communities. Mobile apps with push notifications. The audiences brands actually own — not the audiences rented from platforms — are the long-term asset.
Five. Treating Facebook as a paid channel where appropriate. The organic reach decline means that promoting key brand content with paid spend is increasingly necessary to reach even the existing fan base. Brands that have not built paid promotion into the Facebook program are not getting the value out of it.
The structural question
The bigger question heading into 2014 is whether brand pages on Facebook remain a worthwhile investment of marketing budget. The answer is increasingly nuanced. Brands selling against high-intent audiences with strong content programs and active engagement strategies can still produce meaningful results on Facebook. Brands running placeholder pages with low engagement and high fan counts are spending money on an asset that depreciates faster than they are growing it.
The brands looking past the Facebook fan as the primary social metric — toward engagement, toward owned audiences, toward multi-platform programs — are the brands likely to be ahead of the cycle when 2014 plays out.
The bottom line
The Facebook fan was the right metric for 2011 and 2012. It is a less useful metric for 2014. The brands using it as a single headline number are at risk of optimizing the wrong thing. The brands using it as one input in a broader read on social audience health are operating thoughtfully. The depreciation is real, the algorithm changes are accelerating it, and the brand marketers who are paying attention are already moving past the fan count as the leading indicator.
