Report: Understanding paid and earned reach on Facebook

Understanding Paid and Earned Reach on Facebook examines the impact of paid media in relation to organic content on the platform. Its findings suggest that even those brands with the largest fan bases can reach five times more people, on average, by using paid media in addition to organic publishing. The audience reached with paid media exhibited greater shopping and buying frequency for those brands than the internet average.

The report analyses three brands, including Samsung Mobile, to represent top page performance of Facebook across a diverse range of verticals and fan page sizes.

Key findings from the report are summarised below:

• Paid and organic audiences have similar age distributions—the distribution of paid and organic audience in any given age band are within three percentage points of each other
• Ads are slightly more likely to reach less active Facebook users, while organic media reaches slightly more heavy Facebook users
• Paid media can extend the reach of a single piece of content by more than 100 times
• Within the paid audience for the three brands analysed, participation in shopping and buying is higher than internet average in key areas relevant to the specific brands, suggesting that audiences reached by paid media on Facebook represent a valuable potential set of customers for individual brands

In this article, we summarise the findings from the case study example, looking at results for Samsung Mobile.