When Facebook announced that it would be adding an option of paying to make your post reach out to a large number of audience, it wasn’t received with much enthusiasm from it’s users and page owners, who have a large number of subscribers to their profiles or page.
Unfazed by the reception to the idea, Facebook rolled out the payment option. But in a recent blog post by the website, the company admitted that the counting of the reach of the “paid posts” to the wide audience wasn’t working correctly for several months. The company confirmed that these issues only impacted the reporting and not the delivery. Coding errors wee mooted as the main reason for the counting errors on the website.
This extract was from the blog post by Facebook, which explained the errors that had crept up and gone unnoticed :
“The actual impact of the bugs will vary from Page to Page and day to day based on a number of factors such as when and how frequently you post. To see the overall impact, if any, on your individual Pages, we recommend looking at your organic, paid and viral reach and impressions for your Page and for your posts over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, February 25. Because these bugs impacted our logging systems we won’t be able to backfill Page Insights with historical data.”
Overall, we expect most Pages to see:
- Total reach to stay the same or increase for most Pages
- An increase in paid reach if you ran News Feed ads
- An increase or decrease in organic reach, depending on many factors such as the composition of your fan base, when and how often you post and your spending patterns
- A change in metrics computed from reach and impressions, such as engagement rate and virality.
We know that accurate data is fundamental to building and improving your Facebook presence. We are taking this very seriously. We have already put a number of additional quality and verification measures in place to prevent future bugs and resolve them quickly if they arise.”
The admission of the fact by the Facebook about the error could turn the heat on Mark Zuckerberg once again as many page owners, who have a large fanbase and connect with them on Facebook on a daily basis, have to shell out a certain amount of money to connect with their fanbase, just to increase the company’s revenue through “promoted posts”.
According to Facebook, the problems started when the company was updating its iOS and Android mobile apps to speed up it’s site’s mobile performance, which resulted in a couple of bugs, which led to these counting errors.