Facebook Reduce Business Page Organic Reach Even Further

Bad news, as Facebook reduce business page organic reach even further in 2016. The latest Facebook News Feed update will increase the focus even more on your friends and family. And as a result, there will be even less publicity for any brands and businesses that aren't being shared by people you're connected to.

Brands have complained about the loss in unpaid reach since changes began occurring in 2012. When pages launched in 2007, it was reasonable to think that every fan would see as many updates as you were posting. But as those pages were turned into business tools, and the volume of content increased, it became apparent that only around 16% of fans actually saw a post. That has since dropped further to between 2-6% depending on the size of your business page and how many people are actually liking or sharing your content regularly.

There are two reasons Facebook has made these changes. The first is that a typical Facebook user has an ever-growing list of friends and pages, and more text, photos and videos are being uploaded all the time. So to try and make sense of the overwhelming noise, Facebook uses an algorithm to try and show you the things you prefer.

But it's not entirely selfless. Facebook also has a comprehensive set of advertising tools to promote both pages and individual posts. And as the organic reach continues to decline, an increasing number of businesses are coming to terms with paying Facebook to get their posts and pages seen.

How To Cope With Reduced Page Reach?

If you want to get the most from promoting your business on Facebook in the future, you'll need to combine two approaches.

For the best organic reach, the strategy should be to reduce the quantity of posts, and focus on the quality. And the measure of quality should be whether your fans are liking, and in particular, sharing, your posts. Whether it's text, photos or videos, you need as many relevant people as possible to be inspired to share it with their friends and family to reach a decent percentage of your potential audience.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it should improve the updates you're publishing.

You should also accept that Facebook is now a paid way to distribute your content. Whether you want to increase your fan numbers or drive more traffic to your website, you should really include a budget for promotion. Whether that makes sense for your particular business really depends on your marketing strategy and if Facebook is able to drive awareness and sales for you.

There are some benefits to paid Facebook promotion. Using custom audiences means that you can accurately target specific people. For instance, you can target those who have visited your website and haven't purchased, those who follow your competitors, or by various detailed attributes from age and location to job title and hobbies.

So you may have seen a smaller amount of people viewing your content in general, but even a relatively small budget can help you ensure that you're reaching the people that matter most.

Managing Facebook strategy and pages for a range of clients, we find that a mix of high-engagement content and some paid promotion can still deliver great results. And the cost is competitive with other marketing channels. So if you need help creating interesting content or setting up your advertising, why not get in touch?