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Responding to Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on May 26, 2016

Responding to Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline

Are you responding to Facebook’s organic reach decline? Facebook’s organic reach is going down. That is, fewer people are seeing your posts (unless you cough up some dough. So, what’s a writer or social media marketer to do?

Social Media Today’s Pam Dyer has the scoop on how to respond.

Then in 2012, Facebook restricted brand content reach to around 16%. But in 2014, the figure plummeted to just about a dismal 6%.

Per Dyer

So, according to Dyer, “No one really knows for sure how Facebook decides what appears in news feeds, but some elements are well known as weighting factors:

  • Post types that receive the most user interaction
  • Posts that users hide or report as spam
  • How a user interacts with Facebook ads
  • The device that is used to access Facebook and the speed of its connection”

EdgeRank

EdgeRank has less importance than it had. But it’s not quite absent from the mix. So, it consists of –

  • “Affinity: The closeness of the relationship between the user and the content/source
  • Weight: The action that was taken on the content
  • Decay: The freshness of the content”

Responding to Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline: Four Steps

Dyer lays out four steps.

  1. Optimize Facebook content. Test what’s working, and what isn’t.  What are people clicking on? And are they clicking through to your site? Look at Google Analytics 4 for your site, and determine which content is the source for your Facebook-generated traffic.
  2. Create incentives for sharing content. Whether that’s offers, contents, or just can-you-believe-this types of posts, create the kind of content that people want to spread to their peers.
  3. Work a multi-network campaign strategy. Use hashtags; they show up in all sorts of places, and not necessarily on Facebook.  Also, put your hashtag in all of your promotions, e. g. blogs, television commercials, literature, etc.
  4. Track data, and act on it accordingly! What’s happening with your links? Where is your audience coming from? Dovetailing with step #1, be the company that knows where your traffic is really coming from. Know where your audience is clicking.

Knowledge is power.

Seven Years Later, Organic Reach Decline is Even Worse

But that’s probably something to expect. The number of Facebook users continues to rise exponentially.

Per Hootsuite, Facebook is flirting with 2 billion daily users. Yes, you read that right. But also —

About 15% of Facebook Feed content is recommended by AI from non-followed accounts

Mark Zuckerberg has said that he expects that percentage to more than double by the end of 2023. That’s loads of potential for brands to get in front of new audiences organically. All the more reason to stay on top of the latest changes in the Facebook algorithm.

This is heartening. Maybe Meta has listened to advertisers. After all, that’s how they make their money. If advertisers aren’t selling, then they will go someplace where they will. That place may be TikTok, Instagram (another Meta property), LinkedIn, or the like. Or it may be a bit more outside the box, like Twitch, Quora, or Google ads.

If Facebook doesn’t want its competition to eat its lunch, then Facebook has to make it possible for advertisers to do well on its platform.

Published inFacebook