How You Can Beat Declining Organic Reach on Facebook

You’ve probably heard all about Facebook’s declining Organic Reach by now. For those of you who are tracking your social media analytics, you’ve probably even seen the steep decline for yourself.

These numbers are a bit more deceiving than you may think, and there are tried and true strategies to help combat the decline.

So let’s start at the beginning.

What Is Facebook Organic Reach?

According to Facebook, “Organic reach is the number of people who had an unpaid post from your Page enter their screen.” In other words, if you share an article, image, video, or text post from your company’s Facebook Page without paying for it to reach a larger audience, then your Organic Reach is those who see this post in their Newsfeed.

The dramatic decrease in Organic Reach over the past few months has proven worrisome for some businesses who rely heavily on Facebook to be a free tool to reach the masses. Naturally, business owners and marketers everywhere are asking why there has been such a large shift.

Why Is Facebook Organic Reach Declining?

As you know by now, social media platforms are continually updating their algorithms to meet the ever-changing needs of their users. Facebook is no exception – they’re continually trying to find new ways to keep people in their platform.

So why is there a sudden drop in Organic Reach? There are two key reasons causing this decline:

1. Facebook has updated the definition of Organic Reach

Previously, Facebook defined Organic Reach as any post showing up in a user’s Newsfeed.

This was very deceiving because showing up in a user’s Newsfeed does not require that the post ever showed up on their actual screen or was even seen. In other words, if your post showed up in a user’s Newsfeed based on the Facebook algorithm, then that counted as 1 Organic Reach even if the user exited Facebook before scrolling down far enough to see your post in their Feed.
Since their recent algorithm overhaul roughly a year ago, Facebook updated their definition of Organic Reach to require the post actually be seen by the user in order to count as 1 Organic Reach. Naturally, the new definition is much more refined and decreased the number of Organic Reach in analytics nearly immediately.

If this shift was the only reason for the decline, then it would practically account for the drop off by itself. However, Facebook took another stab at updating their algorithm that led to a deeper decline as well.

2. Facebook is focused on their User Experience rather than their Business Pages

Facebook shifted the way they view their users vs the businesses trying to advertise and promote themselves on the platform.

This shift, unfortunately, makes complete sense. While Facebook gets their money directly from Business Pages on ad spend and from data companies, they indirectly get their money the users. In other words, businesses wouldn’t bother advertising on the platform if users weren’t buying from them.

In order to compensate for this, Facebook decided to put the user experience first.

Since most Facebook users have at some point been negatively affected by content saturation online, the platform updated their algorithm to make sure that only content that users want to see is shown.

Check back on Monday for tips on how to improve your users’ experience on Facebook.