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Weight is determined by the object type — for instance whether it is a photo, video, or link.

There are a multitude of other factors that Facebook uses, such as how many of the user’s friends have interacted with the post or object, how popular the post is overall on Facebook, etc.

Despite the drop in organic reach, Sandmann stressed that the news is not all bad for page admins, as the users who do see their posts are the ones who are most likely to engage with them:

Despite the drop in organic reach many pages are seeing an increase in engagement on their pages and page posts. How can that be? Facebook’s algorithm is getting smarter. The small percentage of fans who do see a page’s posts are the fans who are most likely to engage with the post.

The update is essentially a double-edged sword: Although pages are reaching a smaller audience, they are reaching a more engaged audience and building a core group of engaged users.

First, create amazing content. Think about your audience and what they will find value in. Create content that entertains, informs, or otherwise engages your audience. This is a critical piece in boosting engagement and visibility on Facebook. Second, advertising on Facebook will be necessary to boost visibility on posts, attract more fans, and increase engagement. Clearly, Facebook is using these updates to also push page admins into buying Facebook advertising to increase page visibility. This will be a pain point for many marketers, but we can no longer think of Facebook as a free advertising platform.

Third, focus on building a core group of supporters. You shouldn’t focus on building up your page fans to have a high number of fans; be strategic in building a fan base. Fans who are not engaging with your page do not benefit your marketing goals or your page’s performance, and they may hurt page visibility.

Stay away from running like contests or giveaways that are not directly related to your business. You may gain a lot of fans, but they are there for the wrong reasons. Think of your page as a community, and target users who will find value in what your page has to offer and contribute to the community. The more engaged your audience is, the more visibility you will gain.

Share stories visually with photos and videos to grab users’ attention: Posts with photos receive 50 percent more likes.

Page targeting enables page admins to publish stories into the News Feeds of audiences who are going to be most interested in the content, without inundating those who may not.

Use engaging thumbnails for link stories: Links with thumbnails received 65 percent more likes and 50 percent more comments.

Vary your post type — users don’t engage the same way with every post: Mix it up between status updates, links, polls, and photos.

Optimize your page for Graph Search and mobile: Ensure that your page description is complete and up-to-date, which will help its performance in Graph Search results, and pin posts to ensure that users see the most important stories on both desktop and mobile.

More than half of Gen C use the internet as their main source of entertainment, and 66% spend the same or more time watching online video as watching television [2].

Conversation drives Gen C, especially when it’s aligned with their interests. They are hungry for content that they can share and spread, no matter where it comes from: other people, content providers, brands.

The majority -- 85% -- of Gen C relies on peer approval for their buying decisions [2]. The under 35 set will be 40% of the population by 2020. But more importantly, by then, we’ll all likely be Gen C.

Gen C has a camera in their pockets, so the stuff they capture and curate looks more common, ordinary, even pointless at times. But the ordinary-ness of it all is what is extraordinary. Pictures of the everyday-ness around them allow them to find new meaning, as if they are seeing things for the first time.

They record every detail and then curate that content to reflect their personal values and how they see the world. In fact, 1 in 4 upload a video every week and nearly half upload a photo every week [2]. It’s their way of controlling how they want to be perceived by others

Giving them a way to add their own uniqueness to an experience gives them a reason to add it to the collage of their lives.

Giving them content that matches their definition of quality has become their expectation, not a nice to have.

Well-thought-out, useful and interesting branded content has more opportunity than ever to contribute meaning to people’s everyday lives. But there is also greater risk than ever from messaging that doesn’t feel authentic, relevant, personalized, and participatory.

Gen C wants to give us signals of their interest. They are looking to connect directly with brands that create experiences that offer something relevant and valuable, and they expect that we’ll be ready and willing to act on those signals and continuously improve the quality of our interactions with them.

Rather than starting by thinking about how to reach or broadcast to as many people as possible to get to those who matter, what if we began with engaging those who matter the most. We could prioritize surfacing the 5% — and make our entire plan better by learning from their interactions and leaning on their advocacy to expand our reach in a smarter way. We wouldn’t be abandoning “reach”; we’d be reorienting our thinking towards greater “engaged reach”?

By turning the reach-driven funnel upside down, we’re in effect creating an ‘engagement pyramid’. The engagement pyramid isn’t just about retention and growth of our existing customer base. It’s about starting with the 5% who will be most interested in what we have to say and most willing to speak for us. This group not only includes current customers, but also those most likely to influence others toward your brand.

you need to be “always on” because Gen C is “always on”.

Prioritize content, beyond commercials

Some of today’s most successful brands realize the power of their fans to help generate content that they in turn surface to a broader group.

Although Google Plus and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals, they bring in some of the best visitors: Google Plus users, on average, find themselves spending north of three minutes diving into things shared by connections in their circles. They also visit 2.45 pages during each visit, and bounce only 50.63 percent of the time. LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click, viewing 2.23 pages with each visit and bouncing 51.28 percent of the time. Although many sites see minimal traffic from both Google Plus and LinkedIn, now may be the time to invest in building communities within those networks if engagement really matters to your business.

A referral from Twitter is as good as a referral from Facebook — at least, in terms of bounce rate, pages per visit, and time on site

Pinterest isn’t exactly the social media golden child we all play it up to be: Coming in sixth, pinners bounce as often as Facebook users and tweeps do, but view fewer pages per visit (1.71), and they spend considerably less time on site (64.67 seconds) than almost all of its counterparts, with the exception of StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon drives the least engaged referrals: Post-click, users view a meager 1.5 pages per visit and spend 54.09 seconds on site. It would appear that StumbleUpon’s click-heavy — to “stumble,” “like,” or “dislike” — focus makes users trigger-happy to a fault. Users stumble onto the next thing rather than immersing themselves in the webpage StumbleUpon recommends.

You must also determine which content is most engaging for your business, and create posts geared toward this. Photos are generally the most engaging type of Facebook post and will be all the more important once the new Facebook News Feed is launched, as as your photos will be more conspicuous. Creating content that your fans can engage with (Share, Comment, and Like) and that will, in turn, increase the reach of the post. The more engaging posts will appear more prominently in the News Feeds of the friends of your fans, allowing you to grow your fan base, and spread your message to more Facebook users.

more posts don’t always mean higher engagement. Fans may get overwhelmed if your posts are cluttering their News Feeds and it may ultimately result in them Unliking your Page.

The huge increase in brands’ posts over the years makes it all the more difficult to engage your fans. With the congestion users receive in their New Feeds, brands must pay attention to the content they are posting, the frequency, and the times of day.

fashion brands have always understood storytelling in a way other brands haven't." That might explain why the fashion/retail brands examined averaged 46 repins for their every pin, whereas user-generated fashion/retail pins usually only notch 6 repins. On the other hand, auto brands typically see only three repins versus 10 repins for users’ auto-related pins, and electronics brands average five repins compared to their users’ 14 repins.

best day and time for brands in each vertical to pin—3 p.m. ET on Friday for fashion/retail, noon ET on Friday for auto and 10 p.m. ET on Monday for electronics—but both Bitterman and Gupta said it's hard to decipher how marketers should view those findings. Bitterman inferred that Friday afternoons make sense for fashion/retail and autos because many people shop or take test drives over the weekend and begin planning those outings on Friday. "Electronics kind of stumps me," he said before inferring that Pinterest users interested in electronics may be a relatively smaller population whose prime Web browsing time correlates with prime-time TV.

Facebook charges brands less to promote content with high engagement rates than it does for sub-par content. “Content that doesn’t get any play and is optimized out of Newsfeeds is more expensive to promote to more people,” he said. “That’s good for [people] because they are seeing relevant content, and it’s good for brands because we’re encouraging them to create engaging content.”

Many consider these to be vanity metrics: measures which are easy to understand but on their own explain little about the actionable effect.  They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter. More actionable metrics are argued to be active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits

Talking about Twitter specifically, Adi Avnit de-emphasizes the importance of followers due to the fact some users follow back others simply because of etiquette. His ‘million follower fallacy’ entails that this etiquette is leveraged by some users to elevate their follower count. The theory is not without evidence. Cha et al. (2010) measured user influence in Twitter and found that retweets and mentions showed great overlap, while followers gained… not so much. However, Kwak et al. (2010) in contrast found followers and page rank to be similar, while ranking by retweets differed.

investigated to what extent consumers engaged on brand tweets based on 4 dimensions:  amplification (retweets), reach (followers), conversations (mentions) and attitude (sentiment).

Popular measures are the 3F’s (friends, fans & followers).

following a great amount of people primarily affects a brand’s follower count. It doesn’t correlate with the other, more actionable, metrics. In fact, those brands perform worse on the other measures. Ergo, brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics

All interactions, whether it be likes, shares or wallposts, increase the EdgeRank which in turn exposes more fans to your content.

As the number of fans grew, so did the number of engaged fans (the interactions per mille stayed about the same). These two elements act as a positive spiral constantly growing the other.

I pose that the amount of fans, followers or friends is a relevant metric, considering it as the potential interaction userbase. Taking in consideration that your goal is to increase the number of engaged users.

Reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence. Brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics. Increase your user base – as your fans grow, so will the number of engaged fans

Brand growth, they maintain, is attained not by reaching a few loyal fans but a larger number of light and medium buyers. In this understanding of the marketing and media worlds, social is just another media channel useful for its reach rather than any notion of engagement.

Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers rather than the more casual shoppers that a brands needs to reach in order to grow

Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends.

weekdays provide 14% more engagement than weekends, so this is definitely one you’ll want to test on your audience.

retweets have been shown to be highest around 5pm.

For click-throughs, the best times seem to be around noon and 6pm.

Twitter did an interesting study of these users and found that they are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute.

They’re also 119% more likely to use Twitter during school or work hours.

10pm–6am: This is the dead zone, when hardly any emails get opened. 6am–10am: Consumer-based marketing emails are best sent early in the morning. 10am-noon: Most people are working, and probably won’t open your email. Noon–2pm: News and magazine updates are popular during lunch breaks. 2–3pm: After lunch lots of people buckle down and ignore their inbox. 3–5pm: Property and financial-related offers are best sent in the early afternoon. 5–7pm: Holiday promotions & B2B promotions get opened mostly in the early evening. 7–10pm: Consumer promotions are popular again after dinner.

 23.63% of emails are opened within an hour of being received, this is something we definitely want to get right.

For more general emails, open rates, click-through rates and abuse reports were all found to be highest during early mornings and on weekends.

In a different study by MailChimp open rates were shown to be noticeably lower on weekends.

open rates increased after 12pm, and were highest between 2pm and 5pm.

A GetResponse study backed this up by showing that open rates drop off slightly, and click-through rates drop significantly on weekends. GetResponse found that Thursday is the best day for both open rates and click-throughs.

70% of users say they read blogs in the morning More men read blogs at night than women Mondays are the highest traffic days for an average blog 11am is usually the highest traffic hour for an average blog Comments are usually highest on Saturdays and around 9am on most days Blogs that post more than once per day have a higher chance of inbound links and more unique views

As far as best practices, the group found that 76% of content that was shared had a photo attached, and 18% had a video as part of the message. As a whole, tweets sent between 2 and 5pm PST generated the most response.

To calculate your own engagement—or that of any fan page—here’s the formula:(PTAT / Likes)*100, where PTAT is “people talking about this.”

(Likes + Comments + Shares on a given day) / # of wall posts made by page on a given day / Total fans on a given day)*100

But for curators to surface awesome content, there has to be awesome content to begin with. Original content, from inspirational marketing videos (like Nike's below) to an online-specific show, will continue to rise in popularity. While user-generated content will exist as long as users exist, and can often be very successful, the next five years will see viewers putting curated quality over random quantity.

Now the online market is over-saturated with tons of low-quality, unpredictable content. As a result, the next stage the web's evolution lies in curation and original content.

in an attempt to push the brand, marketing videos often forego authenticity in favor of an over-markety tone. This disengages the viewer and separates them from the brand. Online users don't wanted to be sold to, they want to be engaged.

Brand loyalty stems first from producing the best product possible, but once you've captured a user's attention, it's about engaging that user and making them feel special. Because of their loyalty (whether that's liking a brand on Facebook or signing up for their newsletter), they want to feel as if they are in on a secret that non-followers don't have access to.

Brands should create a movement they believe in--and match their videos to it--rather than slamming their brand down their viewers’ throats. Be authentic and engaging and the viewers will come.

Like Pinterest did for online photography, a new startup will emerge for curated video content.

“The whole phenomenon of cocreation is the most important change in what’s going on right now. You get the best, most authentic communication if you cocreate your messaging by consulting with employees and by engaging them in a dialogue.” By fostering what amounts to an open-source approach to content generation, leaders can inspire “employees to proselytize, to ‘own’ what they talk about, to advocate enthusiastically for their company,”

inclusive leaders know that bringing non-sales employees into the sales process can offer a low-cost, high-impact way to generate interest in their company’s latest offering. Word of mouth, ideally, starts at home.

letting employees join the fray of organizational conversation means letting go--letting go of the eminently understandable impulse to monitor and restrict what people say on company-sponsored communication channels. The advent of social media raises a particular challenge for leaders: Should they seek to impose rules on a medium that appears to be as unruly as it is powerful? But there, too, inclusive leadership requires a willingness to give up the need for control, together with a faith in employees’ ability to control themselves.

Conversational inclusion fosters employee passion.

Passion of that kind, in turn, helps fuel greater innovation, faster execution, and other ingredients of improved organizational performance. “The goal is to have engaged employees,” says Larry Solomon, of AT&T. “If you’re an engaged employee, you’re going to score high on your commitment to customers, your loyalty to the company, your overall happiness as an employee. You’re going to stick around, and you’re going to act as an ambassador for the company when you’re talking to your friends and family. And one of the key factors in having an engaged workforce is creating an environment where people feel like they’re being listened to.”

there is still no reliable way to measure the return on investment. Analytics companies are getting better at tracking whether engaged fans eventually make a purchase decision, but brands are still, by-and-large, forced to look at the number of clicks a brand page feeds to its website.

The ComScore report is littered with the phrase “Fans and Friends of Fans,” signaling the strong emphasis successful brands are taking to cater to the people who can implicitly endorse them to others. If one of your friends is a fan of Starbucks, you’re more likely to be exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook. And if you’re exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook, you’re 38% more likely to make a purchase in the next four weeks.

“The idea behind amplification is that Fans who are reached with brand messages can also serve as a conduit for brand exposure to Friends within their respective social networks,” the report said. “Because the average Facebook Fan has hundreds of Friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens of Friends with earned impressions through their engagement with brand messages.”

“While this research adds weight to the importance of social media, it also brings an important questions to the forefront – are the elevated spend levels among Fans and Friends of Fans the result of the messaging or a predisposition among these segments?

In other words, am I spending more at Best Buy because my friends like it, or because I hang out with people who are into tech gadgets? Am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks in the next four weeks because I saw a friend liked the brand on Facebook, or am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks because I run with people who like Starbucks - whether or not they choose to publicly declare so on Facebook?

Most likely, it’s a combination of both, as well as other factors including traditional advertising and proximity. In my case, I end up drinking more Starbucks than I’d like because it’s the only passable coffee shop within walking distance to my house. It’s a decision that I feel better about, perhaps because so many of my friends implicitly endorse Starbucks by liking the company on Facebook.

55% say they’re connected to 100 or more people through social sites, while 15% are connected to 500+ people.

Gen C is often time-poor and has become incredibly selective when navigating the media landscape, optimizing consumption for maximum returns. They turn to trusted advisors to help them navigate the space, using email lists, social media feeds and content aggregators to map out a media ecosystem that satisfies both their functional and emotional needs.

More than one in three say YouTube is their most important or second most important source of entertainment online, and 46% think of YouTube as an alternative to TV.

Gen C openly welcomes brands into its social circle – for starters 39% say they think of YouTube as a platform to engage with brands. Being engaging, authentic and shareworthy is the cost of entry, with advertising and content both put to the same litmus test; they’ll either switch off if it’s not relevant or engage if it is.