Fan penetration is one of the most important factors on Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) which provides a complete overview to focus on one’s social media activities as it provides the insight how well a person is able to reach the community he or she is building on Facebook. Hence, it’s a crucial success determinant for an influential social media presence which ultimately results in yielding positive ROI. But in recent times a gradual decline is being observed in the Fan penetration of Facebook because, in spite of employing numerous tactics to lure in customers, the reach of brand pages has been just limited to 11.3% of fans. Furthermore, the approximated 100 million duplicate Facebook accounts have negatively impacted the authenticity of real admirers of the page. Hence all these factors have led to the dropping of fan penetration on Facebook but on the contrary, have increased the Engagement rates on this giant social network.
According to a recent study conducted by Komfo,it was revealed that the Facebook pages’ posts reach a smaller amount of their fanbase, but the viewers who do take a glimpse of posts actually engage more and click on posts. The study took into consideration 8,000 brand pages internationally from August 2013 to August 2014 and deduced that overall click-through has gone up 48 percent year-over-year, but fan penetration has come down 55 percent on year-over-year basis.
The transition of fans to engagers
The social media marketers are transitioning from using the Facebook platform as an open medium for attracting the customers by pushing them for more likes, into focusing on the value of true dialogue and engagement. This is really a positive sign for the business ethics as these values are directly proportional to the true dialogs with the fans.
Facebook also is playing a significant role in encouraging brands to make more encouraging content by rewarding page posts with high CTR. These posts are being flashed numerous times to more and more users which have led to a substantial increase in the engagement rates- measured through CTR (Click Through Rate).
As the reach of organic posts is condensing and for many people paid reach is getting harder to come by too, Facebook notes that the trade-off involved with this phenomenon is higher CTR and higher engagement. Facebook’s rationale with the reach reduction is that now messages are getting to those people who would be most likely to take an action, but this decreased reach metric has led to the development of unwillingness among the page admins to become serious advertisers.
Increasing engagement rates good news for business values
Facebook is constantly devising new methods to remain as the most preferred social network for its users and hence is continually changing their algorithms to ensure that the most relevant posts from its pages’ reach to the audience. This potential viral reach of Facebook post has inspired many marketers to create a brand page and the majority of the brand messages delivered by these pages are focused on the information which the brand wants to convey to the consumers rather than what the consumers or Facebook users think is interesting. This has been the driving factor for Facebook hosting over 15 million brand pages on its gigantic network
Large Fan base no more a ladder of success
Quality counts more than quantity in the case of Facebook posts, hence instead of trying to increase on number of  hollow followers, the brands should focus on having a smaller fanbase, create some local pages and really ensure that the users who like their page really love the brand and get lured to it. The Fan engagement is an important factor in popularity on Facebook, but as long the content of the pages is lucrative to which the fans are really willing to engage to, then no matter what the size of one’s fanbase is, the Facebook algorithms would automatically ensure that the brand would shine through the newsfeed.
In addition to this, marketers should concentrate on lowering the amount of their call to action posts and focus on interactive posts more. This would support their content efforts with Facebook advertising which in turn would maintain a high level of penetration whilst improving their pages’ reach and engagement. The recent launch of new cross-platform ad network Atlas by Facebook is an effective step towards this consolidation of its advertising base and with loads of impending dynamic changes yet to dazzle the social world, we can expect that the diffusion of blue ink on the world map by this social media is not going to subside so soon.
