How to Increase Organic Reach on Facebook Page

Facebook Organic Reach Plummets for Brands

Has the organic reach for your Facebook Fan Page dropped to almost nothing in recent days? The good news: you’re not alone, so it’s not necessarily that you’re being “punished” for producing or sharing low quality content. It’s happening pretty much across the board. Facebook has updated the algorithm for News Feed stories & Fan Pages simply aren’t getting any love!

The bad news: you’re not alone…this is bad because if Facebook was just punishing poor quality, low engagement content, then it’s a problem you can fix. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to the case. This article by Derek Halpern shows an example of a post with good engagement only being shown to less than 10% of his Page fans.

Facebook Paid Reach – Boost Your Post

As Derek correctly points out in his article, companies aren’t going to pay to boost content that is just interesting, fun, or industry news. Brands will likely only pay for their version of a Facebook commercial, which makes sense from a brand’s perspective. However, this means that personal Facebook News Feeds will filled not with interesting, engaging content from companies, but instead with advertisements. I’ve already heard several complaints from people about how their News Feed is full of “ads.”

If you’re running a Facebook Fan Page, that means you also have a personal Facebook account. Have you seen the changes in your News Feed? Do you sometimes wonder which account your in & accidentally post to your business when you mean to post to your personal account? We recently wrote a post about keeping Facebook accounts separate.

For our business pages, we have found that boosted posts do perform very well, and the highly targeted advertising options on Facebook make it very easy to get in front of the right audience – both demographically and geographically speaking. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the response on these ads — will they be further diluted by other advertisers and noise? Will Facebook users be turned off by this new model of the News Feed? Stay tuned updates on those questions.

What to Do?

In the meantime, here are 2 actionable items to help alleviate your Facebook Organic Reach conundrum. First, start an email list if you don’t already have one. Derek harps on this topic in his article and rightly so. Take control of the things you can control, and in business, that means owning the contact info for your customers and fans. It’s truly invaluable. Need help figuring out what to do with those email contacts? Contact me. Let’s get coffee & discuss your options (there are many).

Second, use Jason Yormark’s guide to request your Facebook Fans keep your notifications in their News Feeds. As he points out, you may not have a huge response on this request, but it’s certainly worth it to ask. You may even find that you have some more loyal customers and fans than you realize — perhaps even a couple who could be influencers with a little encouragement.

So don’t worry that your Facebook Organic Reach decline means you’ve been blacklisted by the social media giant. Just be aware of what’s going on and test a couple options on how to better stay connected with your audience. Let people know how they can stay engaged by turning on your Page notifications in their News Feeds, and by all means, start collecting data yourself so you control your own marketing destiny.