A new report upends the conventional wisdom that Facebook's algorithm tweaks have left brands out of the News Feed, a phenomenon that Facebook itself has acknowledged.
Socialbakers looked at 3 million of the largest brand Pages and found interactions have jumped 30% since January. The researcher also found that media Pages were experiencing an even greater boost:
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"In my personal opinion, Facebook is still heavily growing as a business, and more and more users engage with the entire platform -- including engagement with brand pages," says Jan Razab, CEO of Socialbakers. "Many big brands have great content that they are publishing through the platform and are really learning to engage their audiences, and this is where the growth is coming from.
Razab added that "the reason why more media appear is clearly a quality thing -- media really know how to publish content, and they can make it more and more interesting."
Socialbakers' research is an outlier. Since Facebook's late-2013 algorithm tweak, many researchers have found the reach for brands has suffered. In December, Ignite Media looked at 21 brand Pages and found a 44% decline in the first week of December, after Facebook changed its algorithm. Ignite claimed reach for brand posts was 3% vs. Facebook's previous claim of 16%.
SimplyMeasured also recently looked at the top 10 brand Pages and found a 40% drop in organic reach.
Some advertisers suspect Facebook is purposely hiding brand posts in the News Feed to encourage brands to buy more advertising. However, in a blog post this month, Brian Boland, Facebook's vice president of ads product marketing, attributed the change to a rise in the amount of overall posts and an emphasis on showing "relevant" posts in the News Feed.