About a year ago, a client (which happens to be a small business) informed me that they needed to reallocate some of their marketing funding away from social media and toward a Google Adwords campaign. They didn’t cancel our contract, but the amount of work I did for them dropped.
I thought that this would make a good case study of what happens when you go from managing social media accounts 3 times per week to only 1 time per week.
Here is a chart covering the last two years of Facebook reach for this client:
You can clearly see a drop in reach over that 2-year period.
Because long-term reach graphs highlight extreme peaks an valleys, here are snapshots of the same 30-day period from 2014, 2015, and 2016. These better show the daily traffic.
This gives us a much clearer picture of how the traffic has changed.
Average post reach has dropped
The average daily post reach for each of these 30-day periods was (from top to bottom): 139, 122, 78. So the average daily post reach has been virtually cut in half over the last two years.
Highest post reach has dropped
Notice the highest post reach in each period. The first is at about 1,100, the second 500, and the third 375. In fact, the second highest peak in the first chart is higher than the highest peak of the last chart.
The lows have become the highs
Also notice that where the lows are in the first chart has now become where the highs are in the last chart. What two years ago was regarded as poorly performing posts would today be considered successfully performing posts.
It is challenging to productively manage social media accounts without putting sufficient time into them. Logging into Facebook or Twitter once a week will be insufficient to engage with customers and produce content.
