Facebook Wasn't The Problem, I Was The Problem

At the end of July I accepted a job that required me to take over the Facebook page of the organization. The people running it before me had made strides to grow the page by posting multiple, multiple, multiple times per day, but engagement rates were low. 

I thought I could turn that around. And, I actually did, for a while. 

The next three months our page nearly doubled itself and engagement had never been higher, but an odd thing start occurring roughly a month ago: all analytics were dropping. Organic reach was abysmal, engagement was even smaller, growth had nearly stopped.

I believed what I was posting was similar to exactly what I had been posting for the months prior, so I came to what seemed like a natural conclusion: Facebook was screwing us over. I believed they were trying to force us to continue to pay so our content could reach the numbers it had before, not too far of a stretch if you put a tiny bit of thought behind it.

But then I started thinking about my workflow over the past month. I hadn’t been re-writing posts to make sure that the wording was the best I could make it. I had been posting haphazardly and not during the peak times when users were scrolling through their feeds. And, I hadn’t been keeping up with what other pages were successfully creating.

So for the last week I have going back to creating social media posts like they should be created. You will never believe what started to happen, the numbers started getting better. Big twisting ending, I know.

It’s easy to put the blame on a giant tech company like Facebook when we aren’t getting the results we want, but before we start declaring “Conspiracy!” let’s make sure that we first analyze if our content is up to par and use the data that we understand about our audiences and Facebook to fix the problem ourselves.

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