These 4 Charts Reveal Facebook’s Strength as a Media Platform

Data-driven marketers’ eyes start to roll when brands say they can’t get organic reach on the Facebook® platform anymore. Yes, of course brand reach has dropped over the last year or so. But that doesn’t mean brand marketers can’t get that reach – they’re just not making the right content to do so.

Media outlets have been incredibly engaging on Facebook, and with an almost entirely organic distribution strategy to boot.

Between organically interacted and viral content, media outlets paid for almost none of the eyeballs on their posts while brands paid for about 70% of theirs. And just how many eyeballs were those?

A lot. Those interactions numbers up on the y-axis are in the billions – that’s not a trick.

But even within media, it’s easy to forget how much Facebook dominates over other platforms, social or otherwise. Compare it, for instance, to one of the world’s most-visited landing pages (in this case one that was just redesigned for better mobile viewability).

ESPN, ranked as one of Alexa’s top 100 most-popular sites on the Internet and its largest sports website, had 26 million daily visitors in November 2014. As the network wrote in its Media Zone then, “ESPN’s last six months now comprise the top six monthly unique visitor totals in sports category history.”

But Facebook blew them completely out of the water. Even if you take Facebook’s lower Q4 results, the difference is wild. In December 2014, Facebook had 526 million monthly active users on mobile compared to ESPN’s 91 million total in November. Wow.

Brands Could Learn From Media’s Consistency

Social media is clearly the place for media outlets to get the most efficient, cost-effective traffic. But brands aren’t getting the same kind of engagement out of Facebook that media publishers do. Want some context?

• The top 12 media posts engaged more users than any brand post.
• 100,000 interactions is a significant amount. The top 92 media posts hit that benchmark – while only 11 branded posts did.

These may sound like random numbers, but the picture they paint is clear: media brands are getting more out of Facebook for much less money than brands are.

That’s why we’ve designed a unique feature to stop inefficient spend. Our Promoted Post Detection tool enables brands to track their competitors’ paid and organic content right in Socialbakers Analytics. Now brands can get the most out of their marketing budget in the smartest way possible.

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