Managing a number of clients who’s target audience consists of primarily Evangelical Christians, there is some interesting data that reveals that this faith based audience is much more engaged then the average. Looking at Facebooks audience insights for 100k active people that follow Evangelical Christian Facebook pages we see the following:
- 65 pages liked on average for the Christian audience compared to just 19 for all Facebook
- 31 post comments in the last 30 days compared 7 for all Facebook
- 34 post likes in last 30 days compared to 8 for all Facebook
- 15 post shares in last 30 days compared to the 2 for all Facebook
- 23 ads clicked in last 30 days compared to the 6 for all Facebook
With the decrease engagement of organic reach on Facebook, this insight is encouraging to those looking to reach the Christian audience. Facebook claimed in August 2013 that every time a user logs into Facebook there are on average 1,500 stories that could be shown in the news feed. Given Facebook’s user base has grown since that stat was given, the news feed is now more competitive than ever. Obviously Facebook cannot show all of these stories, because frankly it would be an overwhelming amount of information, resulting in a bad user experience. That is where Facebook’s news feed algorithm comes into play.
Facebook’s algorithm uses a number of factors to establish which posts should be shown to users. Previously called Edgerank, the algorithm now has over 1000 contributing factors but still focuses on three main influences: Affinity, Weight and Time.
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Affinity is defined by a user’s relationship with the person or page that created the specific Facebook object, essentially how much the user interacts with that person or page.
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Weight is determined by the object type, for instance whether it is a photo, video or link.
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Time, the last major factor, takes into account how recent the action occurred, which in Facebook vernacular is called Time Decay.
There are a multitude of other factors that Facebook uses, such as how many of the user’s friends have interacted with the post or object, how popular the post is overall on Facebook, etc.
With the continued drop in organic reach, marketers must continue to produce content that engages their fan base but these findings are some good news for those reaching out to the faith based community.
