How to Battle Facebook’s Shrinking Organic Reach
J Haselwood
The digital marketing world has been buzzing the past several weeks about the ever-shrinking reach of Facebook Pages. AdWeek, Forrester, Fortune, and more have published featured articles that have marketers scrambling to review their Facebook tactics. It’s being reported that in February 2012, organic reach of Pages was around 16% of a Page’s audience. In March of 2014, this reach had dissipated to just 6.5%. I would caution you to review your own organic reach on Facebook before being alarmed at these stats.
The summary is that Facebook has modified its newsfeed algorithm to allegedly show more relevant content to its users. Conspiracy theorists are all over this and predicting Facebook will soon allow no posts to be seen by Pages in the News Feed unless it’s a paid advertised Promoted Post. Though the size of this decrease does seem a little fishy, all hope for businesses is not lost. I’ve noticed the reach of my clients’ Facebook Pages decrease somewhat as well, but not to a point that eliminates social media success. Facebook has kept the carrot moving and businesses will have to smarten up and adjust their communication tactics.
I’ve put together the following insights on how your company can battle these changes and still maintain a degree of success on Facebook. Some of these may be common sense items you’re already doing, and some may provide a fresh perspective:
1. Know When and What To Post – Facebook Insights has come a long way and provides excellent data points that can fuel your communication tactics. Two things that I would deem most important are when your audience is online andwhat types of posts your audience is responding to the most. These are two data points you can find in Facebook Insights. Learn what types of communication works the best and use that as your foundation for talking to your audience. Of course, you will have to change up the types of messaging you post, as to not bore your audience; however, learn what works and go with it. Then, make sure you post it when your audience is online. This doesn’t mean post at 6pm every night if that’s when your audience peaks. This means post it within a window of when your audience peaks.
2. Create a Content Calendar - You shouldn’t be thinking of something to say on Facebook every morning of every day. This thinking should be done in advance. I would recommend planning 60-90 days out, at least one post per day that is relevant to your audience. You can utilize tools like Hootsuite to schedule those posts ahead of time. Utilize the “day of” posts to publish content that may be more time-sensitive. This will allow you to have a well thought out communication plan that is consistent. Does this take time? Yes. Does this take a lot of time? Yes…..but it’s more important now than ever to do this in order to remain relevant and successful on Facebook.
3. Think of Organic Reach Like an Open Rate- Organic reach on Facebook has decrease significantly and may continue to slide further. What do you expect? It’s a free service, and Facebook is allowing a way for you to talk to your audience on their platform for no charge. This business model for Facebook can’t work forever, as they see a moneymaking opportunity. Hey, they’re a public company now. Consider your organic reach similar to an open rate in email. If you have an email list size of 1,000 or 25,000,000, everyone is not going to read or open your emails. You reach who you can when you can.
4. Play the Game – This is a scenario when the old adage of “some of something is better than some of nothing” applies. In other words, 6.5% of 1,000,000 are better than reaching 6.5% of 2,000. Playing the game includes buying page Likes on Facebook. Depending on how robust your digital marketing efforts are now, you may already be paying to acquire email or audiences through SEM or other means. This is now becoming part of the ol’ audience acquisition expense when you look at various sales or marketing funnels. My only word of caution is don’t spend money on Likes if you have no communication strategy on Facebook. You will be throwing money away building audiences if your message is infrequent or irrelevant to your audience, which may result in your organic reach diving even more.
As of now, you can still be effective in reaching your audience on Facebook, but strategy and post content are at an all-time importance. The digital shell game continues to evolve and us marketers are unfortunately at the whim of these large company’s platforms when they make changes. The barriers continue to mount, but the battle must continue.