What Is Negative Feedback

Morning All,

Wanted to kick off this week with a post that is kind of linked to a few recent ones I’ve posted about Facebook and the whole ‘reach’ ‘edgerank’ topic.

So as much as you are aware (if you aren’t then by now you should be) that by Liking, Commenting or Sharing something that someone posts you are infact positively ‘endorsing’ so to speak their actions. In doing so you are notifying Facebook that you like their actions, and want to be notified of more updates / actions of a similar vein via your Facebook newsfeed.

So what if you don’t like something that someone posts, you feel they are updating too much, or kind of spamming your newsfeed – well there is the action for you to ‘hide’ that story, or ALL content from that user,or report it for spam. That is  known as Negative feedback, and the updates from said person / page will no longer be delivered to your newsfeed.

Everyone who uses Facebook with a business page works incredibly hard at getting content out there and in front of as many people as possible, but how many of you out there are paying attention to see if what you are posting, is what your audience wants to see?

To understand how this works, and to what level your posts are getting negative feedback, you need to be paying attention to your business page insights.

If you have experience with the insights, you will of course know this is where your most recent and most popular content is listed. Broken down quite simply inside as follows:

• The post
• The reach of the post
• The number of engaged users
• How many people were talking about it
• The post’s virality.

To understand it more, you can click on the ‘Engaged Users’ and it further breaks down how people engaged with your content – did they watch the video, clicked on a link, viewed a photo and then subsequently shared the photo – creating their own story from your post? It is here you would also see if they gave the post negative feedback.

Facebook officially define Negative Feedback as follows:

“People who hid your post or gave it negative feedback in their news feed”

You can’t really control, nor know what will work for every single person who likes your page, and just like in life, you can’t please everyone – the same applies inside Facebook.

That said, however, I think its important for people to review their Negative Feedback reports, which are easily downloaded from within your insights at your page.

It is invaluable for future content planning to understand what content people don’t value, or aren’t interested in so just hide those stories. It can help you work out how to repackage / purpose what you want to say / deliver – are you using too many words, or the wrong words, are the updates too frequent, are you over using photos & videos?  It could be a large variety of things, so its important to review this, and its pretty simple to pull the data to analyse.

If you manage accounts for clients, or even your own you MUST spend time with your insights, and become familiar with how it all works!

The great thing about insights, is the ease of pulling the data and exporting to an Excel spreadsheet. You can pull data at a page and post level, and incredibly the Negative Feedback stats are available for both. The ones reported at POST level are the most helpful if you want to improve what you are sending out to the masses.

Here’s how you pull the data: 

• Go to ‘insights’ section of your dashboard
• Click ‘Export Data’
• Select ‘Post Level Data’
• Select date range you wish to analyse
• Click Download
• Excel file will then be in your ‘downloads’ section of your computer

Once you open the file you will see inside the ‘Key Metrics’ tab you will see 2 things:

Lifetime Negative Feedback Users

Lifetime Negative Feedback from Users

Pay attention to the first, since it’s a unique number, in this case you are trying to see how many fans aren’t feeling your messaging.

Here negative feedback refers to the amount of times a fan has hidden your post, or marked it as spam. You can see what specifically your fans are doing by checking out the “Lifetime Negative Feedback Users” and “Lifetime Negative Feedback from Users” tabs. Especially important is how many people are choosing to hide all of your posts based on just one – That is exactly what you don’t want too happen!!!!

To get it ‘right’ so to speak is a bit of a balancing act – for some people and their niches / business sometimes visual content is all you need, or even those that offer practical help may find that all their users are interested in are written ‘how-to’ guides.

Unless you pull this kind of report on a regular basis, how will you actually know the true % that isn’t hitting newsfeeds because the audience have decided they don’t want to see it (rather than Facebook itself taking it away)

Of course like I’ve said before it is nigh on impossible to please all people at the same time, so the chances are most of your posts will incur some level of negative feedback purely because of what people like / find useful / valuable – so its always important to compare the negatives against the positives.

There is also a simple way of calculating your negative feedback % which is as follows:

Divide the number of people who gave a specific post negative feedback by its lifetime reach, which you’ll find on the “Key Metrics” tab of your exported post-level data, and use this as a great indicator of what has been less successful than other posts.

Reach Vs Impressions 

Reach is an organic number, whereas impressions is not. One person can see a post multiple times, but it won’t change how they feel about it (most of the time).

I don’t want you to become bogged down with the whole negative feedback thing, if you are a Social Media Manager and you have to provide reporting, then just including this data will make the report seem more thorough, and will allow for better content planning as part of your marketing mix.

I wanted to share this with you, as it does fit in with recent posts I’ve done, and is something I have spent sometime looking at on my own Facebook page, and like I’ve always said to everyone who is a part of my community. This is my journey as much as it is yours so I want to share with you things I think will help you on your journey through Social Media!

Happy Monday, and wishing you all a great week!

Clair

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