As a professional digital marketer and entrepreneur, Facebook has become an integrated part of both my personal and professional life. While sparking the conversation on my latest fishing photo or check-in at the Pier 500 is a breeze, sparking that same conversation and engagement on a Facebook Business Page Post is quite the opposite.
Stopping to think about this, over the past two years it has become increasingly difficult to gain traction with business pages. Best practices that worked before stopped working, consultations ended with “we tried Facebook”, successful campaign strategies quickly tapered, and pages with tens of thousands of followers and large marketing budgets started filling my newsfeed.
“So what gives Facebook?” Author
Slowly but surely the local businesses that I had vowed to support, by liking their pages and engaging with their posts, evaporated from my newsfeed altogether. I was losing touch with those that inspired our beginnings without even realizing that they were still there. So what gives Facebook? Why take from the startup and give to the enterprise? Is organic reach dead?
Like a modern day Robin Hood, I began my quest to stay true to our business empowerment mission. I dug deep down the Facebook rabbit hole to unearth the marketing secrets to #Winning Facebook for Business.
The Organic Reachpocalypse Synopsis
Reach – Reach is the number of times people have seen your post.
A quick search on Google of “Facebook Organic Reach” turned up less than inspiring results with the top search results displaying;
Facebook Puts Everyone On Notice About The Death Of Organic Reach – Forbes
This Chart Explains the Reachpocalypse and Why Facebook is Laughing All the Way to the Bank – Convince&Convert
Brands’ Organic Facebook Reach Has Crashed Since October: Study – AdvertisingAge
Facebook Has Finally Killed Organic Reach. What Should Marketers Do Next? – Forrester
Is organic reach down for pages? Yes, overall organic reach has dropped from a lofty 16% in February 2012 to a reported low of 2% in late 2014 – early 2015 for pages with more than 500,000 likes.
An official response from the Facebook Help Team states the following;
There’s a direct relationship between a great News Feed experience and the ability of businesses like yours to effectively reach people with the right message at the right time. What is good for people on Facebook is also good for the businesses trying to reach those people. More engaged people on Facebook, who keep coming back, means more opportunities to deliver your message. Knowing this, our engineering team makes changes to the News Feed algorithm to help make Facebook more engaging for people. For example, recently, we made an update so that organic posts from friends that people did not initially see can reappear near the top of News Feed if the stories are still getting likes and comments. This gives the best posts a greater chance of being seen by more people. With this change, it’s important for people to engage (like, click, comment, share) with your business’ posts to regularly see them in News Feed. Check out these links for information on getting more out of your Page posts. Kelly // Facebook Help Team
So this make sense. With social media automation tools posting and sharing away at useless noise the algorithm has evolved to display content that is both relevant to the user’s interests and usage habits. The more they and their friends engage and like a pages posts the more that page will show up in their newsfeed?
Problem solved! Or so I thought…
As an active manager of the Xceptional page I was noticing that I was not seeing our posts in my newsfeed. My interests and usage on Facebook is geared towards entrepreneurship, business, technology, and marketing. I like, share, and comment on our posts frequently so according to their algorithm the posts should be showing up in my feed. However, they were not.
Another example of this problem came with a local podcast, Your What Hurts Podcast, as new episodes were released I would not have a clue as they would not show up in my newsfeed. I engaged with the page regularly, was friends with the founders and podcasters yet once again I was unable to see any of their posts from the actual Facebook Page itself.
There had to be a solution!
A New Hope
Digging further into the problem I found a quick trick that you may instruct your followers (especially your promoters) to perform on their desktop browser or mobile device. This trick will help increase organic reach ten fold as the content you are working so hard to produce will actually be seen by the people who like your page. Check it out!