Facebook Organic reach – going going gone…
It’s time to pay the Facebook piper
For many years while Facebook was building its business it allowed you and me to post things on our Facebook page and these posts where seen by most of our Facebook Fans.
Best of all is allowed us to do this for FREE
And like anything we had once we are not too happy to see it go and going it is. The days of Facebook feeding your marketing messages to most of your fans is gone and its not coming back :-(
Like all good things we did not realize how good it was until it was gone.
How gone it is depends on how many fans you have. For the really big Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of fans organic reach is down to around 2%. Big brands are getting a kicking.
For most pages with less than 2 to 3 thousand fans you can still get organic reach of around 20% , that’s not bad. i do not think we can really complain at that.
Why is Facebook organic reach down ?
Well there is a couple of reasons .
First of all there is competition, Facebook can serve up to 300 posts a day into an individuals news feed. The last time we got info on this there was nearly 1500 posts looking to get shown so you do the maths – 1200 posts did not make it.
Our information on this is old, nearly a year so I shudder to think how many are now fighting to get in
Second there is money – Why would Facebook do something for free when it can charge you. You are in this for the money and surprise surprise so is Facebook. And it has a heafty one billion price tag to justify.
Facebook built this system that allows you to connect with your customer base in a way that was not possible before , this for those who do it right is driving business and Facebook wants you to pay. Do not kid yourself , the social media part of Facebook is only for front end for its ad platform and that is how Facebook wants you to promote your key messages.
How to improve your organic reach
There is still a few things you can try to improve your organic reach.
- Post more often
- Post at different times of the day.
If you post more often in the short term it should increase your reach but if every does this then there will be more competition and this strategy if adopted by many could come around and bite you in the butt…ouch.
People use Facebook at different times in the day, if you only post at the same time each day then you are limiting your reach to only those on Facebook during that time slot. By posting at different times of the day you increase you chances of reaching people you may have other wise missed.
But of course if you have a killer post that you feel will help drive business you really need to turn this into an ad and drive it out there to your audience using Facebook ads.