What Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline Means for You

Anyone who runs a Facebook page has either heard about the organic reach decline or has felt the effects of it firsthand.

For those of you who aren’t too familiar with advertising or reach on Facebook, there are two types: paid and organic. Paid reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post as a result of paid advertisements. Organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.

Since Facebook is declining organic reach for pages, this means brand page posts are becoming less visible in fans newsfeeds. This translates to fewer interactions (clicks, ‘likes’, comments and shares). Facebook wants its brand pages to not only pay to have potential fans see their page, but now they want brands to pay for the content that shows up in fans newsfeeds.

Facebook claims that organic reach is declining because with more pages on Facebook, there’s more content competing to be seen in newsfeeds. The brands that want to get noticed by potential fans and users who already ‘like’ their page have to pay to be seen. Fortunately, Facebook advertising is not terribly expensive. Ads can be run for as little as $2/day and still get great results. Likewise Boosted Posts can be run for $5 or $10. Of course, the money you put behind an ad, the more people will see it.

In order to continue receiving a benefit from marketing on Facebook, marketers have to find a way around declining organic reach. There are three simple steps fans can take that drastically change how often they’re seeing a business’s posts –

• They can encourage their fans to engage with their posts when they do see them. The more you interact, the more the brands posts come up in their newsfeeds.
• They can let their fans know they can go directly to the businesses page, from the left-hand side toolbar, to see updates.
• They can also advise their fans to subscribe to the page to receive notifications every time the business posts something new.

Marketers also have to go beyond the frequent untargeted posts, by publishing relative content to a specific target market. The goal is to get as much interaction on one post as possible. The more interaction from comments, ‘likes’ and shares on a post, the higher your chance of showing up in newsfeeds through organic reach.

As any Facebook user knows, the social media site is constantly changing. For marketers, this means that no marketing plan or advertising campaign is going to work forever. Just as Facebook is constantly changing, businesses have to constantly change in order to keep up.

What have you been doing to work around the decline?