Do you have a Facebook Business Page set up for your organization? If so, you might have started to notice that fewer people are seeing your posts. Though distressing, this is happening for a good reason! Earlier this year Facebook made a decision to change the algorithm they use to determine whether or not your Fans see the posts that you make to your Page. There’s both a bad and a good side to this, let’s break it down and explore how you can make this change work for you.
You don’t see every post made by all of your Friends or the Pages you’ve liked in your News Feed on Facebook. Facebook uses a complicated algorithm to determine what posts show up in your News Feed because there simply isn’t room to have every post show up all the time. So rather than being inundated with posts from all of your friends, Facebook filters the content that you see based on things like the last 1,000 actions you took on Facebook. As you can imagine, this is quite a complex algorithm, and Facebook is always working to improve it so that the content you’re genuinely interested in seeing shows up in your News Feed.
As more and more people have joined Facebook over the years more content is being created every day, making the available space for content in any given News Feed more competitive. Facebook made the hard decision to prioritize content from people’s Friends over content from Business Pages. To get Facebook’s take on why they changed their algorithm read their blog, “Organic Reach on Facebook: Your Questions Answered.” While this is frustrating, it also makes sense! Personally I would much rather see content from my friends and family than content from the J. Crew Facebook Page that I liked 3 years ago and am now too lazy to go and unlike. In the end this means that posts from Facebook Business Pages get seen by fewer and fewer people. The flip side to this bad news is that it means our News Feeds stays healthy with content that we actually care about.
So how can you make this decrease in organic reach work for your organization? I’ve been noticing a trend with all of my clients that the posts that do well do really well, and the posts that don’t do well really tank. Before the change in Facebook’s algorithm most posts on the Business Pages I manager were pretty equally successful, but now there’s a clear difference between the popular and unpopular posts. For example, the majority of the posts on the Page of one of my clients with about 1,000 likes reach anywhere between 30-130 people, but every once in a while we’ll have a post that reaches over 1,000 people – more people than have actually liked our page. While it’s disappointing that a lot of our posts haven’t been performing well recently, I’m thrilled with the posts we’ve had that have gone ‘viral.’ These ‘viral’ posts help to give me and my client a really good sense of what type of content people actually want to see. In this way, the competition for space on the News Feed can be a great tool to help you improve the quality of the posts you make to your Page.
If you still want to increase the reach of your posts, the best solution for cracking the code is to pay for advertising. Contrary to what you might think, paying for advertising on Facebook is very inexpensive, highly efficient, and highly effective. One word of caution: advertising on Facebook requires a lot of know-how to get it right, so before starting your own ad campaign be sure to get in touch with me for some advice. If, however, you’re a confident DIYer check out some of the resources on Jon Loomer’s website to help you get started with your ad campaign.
What have you been noticing about the change in Facebook’s algorithm? Share what you’ve seen in the comments!