15% of Social Posts Generate 90% of Reach

I’ve had a number of recent meetings with executives on the advertising buy side; most commonly from media buying agencies, but also CMOs and other brand marketers. In preparing for one of those meetings, I asked our team to pull one day of Facebook data from the SocialFlow platform. With apologies for the complex scatter plot, here is a view of that data:

More than 61,000 Facebook posts (Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms comprise an even larger data set, but aren’t included here) generated a combined 1.6 billion in organic Facebook reach. If you were to buy that reach at a $5 CPM, you would spend on the order of $8 million just for the ad spend — without even considering the cost of creating all the content.

There are a few interesting patterns in the animated GIF that are worth calling out:

• It’s necessary to plot the y-axis on a logarithmic scale to see what’s going on. If you try to view it on a conventional scale, the posts with reach of 5+ million make it impossible to see all the posts with reach of under 10,000.
• Social posting is clearly a “hit-driven” business. You can see that 15% of the posts generate 90% of the reach.
• We, humans, are peculiar. Despite SocialFlow’s efforts to explain the perils of scheduling posts, we still see large vertical “stripes” in the data which reflect the human tendency to post at even hour and half-hour increments. (Fortunately, most users instead rely on our data-driven algorithms to slot content into the right windows of attention. But still, the scheduling stripes are noticeable.)

We’re spending quite a bit of time and effort around Publisher monetization, and on understanding what marketers and their agencies are looking for — beyond simply a giant Facebook audience. We know that contextual relevance is one opportunity, and we’ve been helping media companies understand how to use their high-performing organic content to drive revenue:

In many ways it’s reassuring to see how great content serves as a magnet for consumer attention. That attention is finite — each of us only has 24 hours in a day, and no matter how hard we try to multi-task, there’s an upper limit to what we can consume.

We’re excited to be working on the “business” of consumer attention, and on finding ways to reward the Publishers who produce so much of the great content. We have some exciting product innovations in the works that do just this, and look forward to sharing more about our plans in the coming weeks!