I spend a lot of time on facebook and some posts can be annoying and irrelevant! There may not be a dislike button, but there are ways for your fans to tell you that they don’t like your content and this feedback can impact on your future page performance.

You may not have even have noticed it, but at the top right hand side of a post on the facebook news stream there’s a small button that a user can click to “hide” or “report story or spam”.

If a user clicks this button, then it’s considered by facebook as negative feedback, which makes the post less likely to show up in others news feeds as well as making it less likely for future posts to reach that user. Once you signal you dislike the post you can also opt to hide all stories from that page on your page, or even unlike the page altogether (probably the worst kind of feedback) as seen below.

Social Fresh reported the breakdown of negative feedback actions and how often Facebook users take each action as follows:

  • Hide Post: 76%
  • Hide All Posts From Page: 16%
  • Report as Spam: 8%
  • Unlike Page: <1%

According to Edgerank Checker – the typical facebook post receives 0.03% negative feedback with the highest feedback coming from travel and leisure, food and beverage and health and medical industries.

It’s important to recognize that not everyone will like the content you produce, and it’s often the posts that have the higher engagement that will also have the highest negative feedback.  The amount of negative feedback that you receive depends on a number of factors – audience size, industry type, whether you’re running a promotion or not, and frequency of your posts just to name a few.

The increased uses of memes (you know those cartoons that are regularly appearing in your news feed) are certainly driving up the negative feedback in many pages so if you are using these sorts of images, worth checking how your fans are impacted.

So how do you monitor negative feedback?

Keeping an eye on the negative feedback for your page is important as impacts the edgerank of your page and the ability for your content to be shown on the news stream of your fans. Yet for many page administrators, they don’t even realize that this is a key metric to measure and it’s more difficult to find to report on.

To view how much negative feedback you are receiving on your page you need to be a page administrator. Once you’ve clicked on the insights panel on the top of the admin section you need to have a look at the Insights home page and scroll down the page to the Page posts area that list your posts.

On the 4th column of the table you’ll see a field called engaged users and you can click on each of the posts to see how many people have engaged as well as seeing what negative actions have resulted.

If you click on each of the posts you’ll be able to see how many people gave the post negative feedback as below.

You can also download your analytics into excel and see daily post feedback and track this on a daily basis.

This sort of analytics does not track sentiment but is a good guide to see what sort of posts are preferred by the fans on your page. Often when you see posts that are not relevant many ignore them, so if people take the time to hide and give you the feedback, you need to take note and learn from it.

How can you avoid negative feedback?

Some negative feedback is unavoidable but can be minimized.

  • Think about the content before you post it – do you think it’s relevant and engaging for your audience? If not, then reconsider posting or think about how you can make it more compelling for your audience to consume.
  • Target your posts – think about targeting ads to a specific geographic location – people don’t always want to know about events in other states if they are not relevant.
  • Remember that images are often a main source of negative feedback (and yet still drive lots of positive engagement). Don’t go overboard using funny photos or memes that are not relevant to your fan base.