With the sparkle of Facebook wearing off for many retailers, and the fact that determining the value of “likes” is like appraising a seaside house just before a strong hurricane blows in, some are questioning whether the efforts on Facebook are worth the return. In fact, many out there wonder with Facebook’s newest round of interface updates, whether “likers” are even seeing brand page posts anymore at all. 
We’ve seen where engagement and reach have been down for a number of companies, but after spending so much effort, and dollars for some, it’s not likely that anyone will just delete their Facebook brand page. It is a worthwhile concern when people stop commenting and liking posts though, and that nagging question of whether or not Facebook has deliberately obfuscated brand posts so businesses will be more likely to advertise gnaws at the paranoid mind. But how many merchants ever check to see if people are listening out there?
When we talk about checking to see if people are listening on Facebook, most people assume it is by posting differently to see if there is any increase in the relatively few likes most people are getting (compared to what they were seeing only a year back). Or, some might wonder, Could there be some button in the Facebook metrics to check for fan interest. Sorry, the Facebook metrics that are provided on reach and interactions don’t count–way too abstract.
Let’s look at one Facebook fan page, we won’t mention by brand name, that has around 2,000 fans. Like many other Facebook Pages with similar fan counts, there are only a trickle of likes and comments (most of the time one or two, topping out at nine or ten on good days) compared to how many there were a year back. One might assume that people just aren’t seeing the posts anymore, because posts are still as engaging as ever.
Testing for fan interest in this case was exercised with this simple question to fans on the evening on May 14: “Lots of folks saying they don’t see our updates on FB…LIKE if you see this one :)” In just 30 minutes, 41 fans had liked the post. Within a couple of days nearly 150 fans had liked the post. That is about 15 times the highest amount of likes recorded on any single post in months. But even so, it’s still less than 10% of total fan count and after a few days no one continued to like the test post. What’s more, even the Page admin. even had trouble finding the test post today for reference for this article.
Compare that to another test post, with virtually the same wording as the aforementioned test, we did on a personal Facebook Page with over 2,300 friends. Only 32 responded with a “like” to confirm that they saw the post. Only 32! This is significant, especially since one might consider that friends have a stronger connection with other friends, over a business Page.
The results of this simple Facebook interest test has broad implications, but it is mainly a reminder that there is a tremendous amount of information passing over user walls, and a lot of that information is being ignored, not seen, or just lost. Users also become desensitized to posts and at some point become unresponsive to recurring concept messages. It’s vital for merchants to keep Facebook posts interesting, and diversify online marketing. One Facebook fanatic recently told us he’s just as active as ever on Facebook, except now he has so much to post that he never bothers looking to see what anyone else is doing. If Facebook enables the narcissistic in all of its 900 million users, it’s likely that Facebook will become another echo chamber/rant box like Twitter. Then what?
