Facebook Brand Pages’ Organic Reach is Plummeting

What Are Your Alternatives for Reaching Your Target Audience Socially?

Facebook is always changing, that’s no secret. It seems the real challenge is finding a way to cut through the noise and reaching your customers socially to engage them. Facebook has been gradually reducing the reach of organic posts by brand pages in an effort to get businesses to switch to paid or sponsored listings. This started in 2012 and then made another algorithm change in December of 2013. Advertising agency Olgivy has been tracking the results of Facebook’s algorithm changes.

Olgivy has released a study  they did, detailing the current organic reach of over 100 Facebook brand pages that they manage accounts for. Analysing the reports inside the pages’ insights and released the summary, this concluded that the organic reach of Facebook Brand Pages is approaching zero. The report showed, “By February organic reach hovered at 6 percent, a decline of 49 percent from peak levels in October. For large pages with more than 500,000 Likes, organic reach hit 2 percent in February. And Facebook sources were unofficially advising community managers to expect it to approach zero in the foreseeable future. (All of the detailed data, analysis and practical recommendations are in the full white paper.)”

What Does This Mean for Your Business’ Facebook Page?

This data obviously calls for a change in your strategy. Spending time posting on Facebook is a waste if no one is seeing it. If you are set on reaching and engaging with your customers on Facebook, then you should consider building a paid or sponsored campaign. Campaigns can start out with a small budget and they can be highly targeted, so chances are you can develop a great way to attract customers on Facebook. Another tactic to engage you customers, clients, or fans on Facebook is to reach out to them through your other channels, like email, for example and highlight what you are doing and sharing on Facebook. You can entice them with a Facebook contest. This is easier to do now than before because Facebook changed their rules for contests  in 2013. You can also reward Facebook fans by adding notifications from your company page to their feed or add you to an interest list. This will automatically notify them when you post an update.

Getting Facebook Fans Directly to Your Page

The other alternative is not to rely solely on showing up in your fans’ news feeds. Driving traffic from your website, email campaigns, or in store signage directly to your Facebook page is a great way to still continue reaching your target audience. If you combine those tactics with a small, budgeted campaign it is very possible to start increasing your reach. As always, use your analytics program and Facebook’s insights to test and monitor the results to make sure that your company is receiving the desired ROI for your social media marketing efforts on Facebook.